Whenever WX avoidance gets discussed a lot of the pilot community view their right to weather avoid as sacrosanct and purely a matter of extreme flight safety.
However there are a (small but significant) group of pilots that want to avoid the slightest bump for passenger comfort. When the sector is quiet I’ll do my upmost to accommodate that but in my experience pilots still ask for the ‘comfort’ avoidance when it’s too busy.
As someone said above, it’s a matter of experience, and that’s also true from the ATC side. It’s pretty easy to judge (to a high degree of certainty) what requests are for comfort and what ones are for safety with a little experience and I don’t think the requests are always made with enough consideration to business of sector or consequences to the network and therefore delays to other flights.
And I’m not having a go at the pilots in this incident with those comments.
As for standardising training for pilots, I’ve had three aircraft on top of each other 1000’ apart approaching weather. One requests left 10, the next 15 right and the third says nothing. Surely it’s best to all do the same thing, even if in the captain’s view it’s the less good (2nd) option?
Standardisation of RT requests would help too.
”Request 10 Right/Left for weather.” Is great.
”there’s a little bit of a build up about 8 miles ahead, will you be turning us before then? And if not could we have 10 right now otherwise we’ll have to go 25 left and round it from the other side?”
Add in the callsign and the ums and ahs and each aircraft on the frequency has moved the best part of a mile in the time taken to say all that. At best that’s the spacing missed, possibly another aircraft is 1 mile closer to his weather or I’m a mile late in giving avoiding action because someone has turned without asking/telling.
I’m sure there are many more examples but then the vast majority of pilots reading are already very good at this stuff, it’s just that it’s not trickling down and a bit more training and standardisation could help us all.