Originally Posted by
2 sheds
No, I have not - and your point, relevant to the OP's original question about standard procedures, is...?
And...I don't think that I implied that a pilot should squawk ident without instruction, did I?
2 s
Sorry I wasn't getting at you personally about the use of 'Ident', as you will know a pilot should only activate it in response to a specific instruction by ATC whereas a lot of pilots (even ATPLs) do not do this.
On busy days, when operating as LARS, there would often be several aircraft waiting to make their initial calls; in these situations you cannot afford to wait while someone makes an initial call passing long winded details of their route etc when you may have someone on a TS or DS which you can see are going to get close to each other and you need to warn them about the situation urgently. For this reason, we always encouraged pilots just to make a initial call using callsign only and wait for the controller to respond.