I hate to sound like one of the Three Yorkshiremen of Month Python fame, but
‘in the old days we…’ The fact is, in the old days, DXB ATC was damned good – and I still recognise many of the voices from those ‘good old days’, so it’s obviously not a question of the skill of the individual ATCO, but the rules they are now forced to work under. It all seemed to grind to a much slower pace about two to three years ago, when they had to go to five miles spacing on departures. I’m assuming there were many other new rules that were introduced at the same time.
Now I know the traffic is heavier than it was in the good old days, so my fond memories of ‘looxury…’ back then have to be tempered by that factor, but the fact is, the ATCOs are obviously working to a far stricter set of guidelines that will not allow on the spot ‘tactical’ decisions that would lessen the many logjams we seem to suffer these days.
What is painful is watching them come out of the stack then do another 50 track miles of vectors.
Hear, hear. As a ‘customer’ of DXB ATC, on arrivals, my main complain is the post hold vectoring. It’s not unusual to approach Dubai with not a lot of fat in the noise-producing department –
(maybe twenty minutes on average, but that can vary quite considerably either way depending upon where you’re coming from and what’s occurred in getting to Dubai with getting planned levels etc). Thanks to the usually benign weather in the area, most times that can be stretched somewhat thanks to the second runway/Sharjah option. If I’m put in the hold, I can work out, with a pretty good degree of accuracy, (even without the PFM box Mr Sperry provides me), my last divert time, be it for RAK, AUH or SHJ/the second runway. This last divert time from the hold includes a calculation for how much fuel I’m going to burn between leaving the hold and crossing the threshold.
In London, (which has to be the yardstick in my opinion for how arrivals at multiple, very busy airports should be conducted), you can be pretty sure, (to within 100-200 kgs in my experience), how much you’re going to burn between release from the hold and touchdown. The controllers there have even tweaked their system (thanks in part to an excellent thread that ran here on Pprune a year or two ago) to make allowance for the higher min clean speed of the 777-300. (If you’re in a heavy -300, anything below 230k really gobbles the fuel, so the ATCOs in Heathrow go out of their way to allow a -300 to stay at 230k until the final turn in to finals, with about 15 – 20 nm to run.) It would be really nice to see the same thing done in Dubai, the home port of all those -300s. Whilst on that point, 160k demands the gear be down in a heavy -300, and that
really drags the fuel flows up. It’s not unusual to be asked for that quite early in the approach.
In Dubai, anyone who held right ‘down to the line’, (as we frequently do in Heathrow), could end up embarrassed because of the cross country vectoring between the hold and the threshold. (The speed control as mentioned above only adds to the difficulty.) Simply put, because of this vectoring, we can’t predict with any degree of accuracy how much fuel we’re going to burn between the hold and the threshold, so most of us add a ****** factor, which in the worst case, could lead to unnecessary diversions.
Most of these problems could be fixed if we talked to each other. I can only agree wholeheartedly with the comment made an earlier poster:
Time to bring back cockpit visits and familiarisation flights. Time also for more pilots to come visit ATC at either UAE centre or Dubai so we can get a better relationship going.
It would be stretching credibility to the extreme if there was to be any security implication in allowing an ATCO onto the flight deck.