I regularly communicate with ATC at my home airport. How can they change to better accommodate international carriers?
A good question. Taking the JFK case as an example.
The biggest difference I note (this is going to be specific to JFK with a comparison to LHR) is that an approach to JFK has a large number of unknown variables. From a visiting pilot’s point of view we never really know the plan.
I realise comparing LHR arrivals to JFK is perhaps unfair, given the complexity of NY terminal airspace, but going into LHR we have an arrival that will end at a specific hold, from there we will be given track miles to run, and consistent speed instructions (220 leaving the hold -180 on base - 160-4dme). Obviously this can vary given traffic and weather on the day but it gives us something to hang our hats on. JFK tends to be a mix up of vectors with very little info on distance to go and ATC expectations of speed. It leads to visiting pilots erring on the side of caution and expecting a last minute loss of track miles so we often start to slow up in expectation of this, which results in issues similar to the one in the transcript you shared. I think it really comes down to ATC sharing the plan as soon as possible - again I appreciate NY airspace is a special case and life isn’t straight forward for ATC. But asking a visiting heavy to fly 180 to inside 6dme isn’t going to work for most operators. BA approach SOPs are conservative, I’ll admit that, but that’s what we have to fly to, and we need ATC to work with us on that.
It can also be a problem at airfield like ORD and BOS when multiple runways are in use. The structure of these airfields, runway layout, airspace restrictions etc make ATC a challenge but the result seems to be the system is designed to protect controllers and make their lives easier, with pilots expected to work with the results. Pilots like consistency and don’t like surprises. Tell us the arrival runway as soon as possible. If we are going to get extended vectors then tell us. If we are going to need to keep speed up then tell us when we can expect to slow down etc. I appreciate it might seem like extra workload for a busy controller, but we don’t visit these airfields everyday and as a result we tend to be overly cautious when we aren’t clear what the traffic pattern/speed expectation is likely to be.
I don’t have a magic answer, NY airspace is what it is and comes with a unique set of challenges for all involved.