Good thread, and brings the point about cross skill cooperation to the fore. In the good old days, we did a lot of fam flights and all the guys in MAN and LBA appreciated them, espescially the descent profiling and the capabilities of the little 'Bus to go down ! It still irritates me that some of the trap heights that are applied to us are not published obviously, things like the 290 by DUB or LIFFY when coming off the ocean and the early descents from the west into LGW. If we depart Dom Republic or Jamaica and get a random route up through New York airspace, level allocation can be a lottery. You may have planned and filed 370 but when they say you have 280 'til 30W it can really upset dinner ! I have had to get rather firm with NY before and eventually we got 330 after 2 hours. Now we are 'encouraged' to be fuel effective, so we were being good boys. By 30W, I am looking at less than a tonne over minimal diversion and we are estimating LGW in the morning rush. I did a similar thing to Scroggs and called early, we were sequenced very effeciently, no one else held because of us and we landed about 700kgs over diversion minima. Now to put things into perspective, 1 go around on a 330 will use at least 2 tonnes of fuel, even if you just do a visual circuit - been there, seen it ! So when we say we feel more comfy with a tonne thinking time, perhaps that helps.
Bring back Fam flights
