Originally Posted by
le Pingouin
The controller was an early phase trainee so it's hard to label it a systemic issue. "Workload" is a somewhat personal perception - he may have been preoccupied with thinking of other issues he perceived to be more important, got flustered & chose the easy solution of denying a clearance. Was there any indication to the controller that this course of action would be in any way dangerous? I very much doubt it. Trainees in any field often choose less than optimal solutions, provide a less than ideal service & just plain screw up, it's all part of the learning process. The instructor probably saw it as a minor inconvenience for the pilot that wasn't unsafe so didn't intervene - to be discussed later.
Why didn't the pilot simply deviate around the airspace? He'd deviate around weather so why is this any different? Or would that have presented a problem for this pilot as well?
P.S. it was "C" the pilot was denied the clearance for.
What was it during his training that made him decide that it would be better to take the easy way out and deny the clearance though? Nothing takes away from the Pilots responsibility in this but I don't believe there is anything that can be changed to Pilots training syllabus or requirements, in general, to address this issue unless we're going to start denying Licences based on perceived "Poor Attitude" either during their training or AFR, even then clearly this person wasn't able to legally fly and chose to, as such no real changes there I think would have affected that part of the flight at all.
This is the problem in these discussions, we're so focused on the minutiae instead of actually discussing the relevant parts that could be fixed for the future. In this case, the Pilot is dead, we can't pick his brains to figure out exactly why he chose to make the decisions that he did and I don't believe any changes to regulations would prevent this from happening. What we do have are the Controllers who were on that day and whose brains we can pick to see why they made their decision and what can be done in the future to enable them to make different decisions and instead all we're getting is "Workload", I don't think this is good enough. This isn't about just one incident either, I'm sure we've all been in situations where clearance was denied with 0 traffic around and no particular reason that we can see, but the thing is there HAS to be a reason why, was there something else happening in the background? Was that controller overloaded with other sectors? Did they just decide not to because they didn't have to and decided that was good enough? I think the fact that a lot of Pilots don't really trust the ATC system in this regard means that the trust is very reduced and more needs to be done to at some level to restore that. Flight Instructors, ASA Instructors, Controllers, Pilots, Ground Handlers, CASA and everyone else involved in Aviation are part of the safety net from start to finish, when there is an incident there isn't always much that can be done and focusing on the things that can't be fixed doesn't help anyone at all.