Paul Martin wrote
Ausatco and others. I will try again to ram home the point of common sense. The conditions you mentioned are not a consideration. No one in their right mind would land off that sort of approach in those conditions without a clearance. I assumed some would get emotional but god almighty this is unreal! Low vis, a/c crossing rwys, a school bus full of kids. Yes go around. What about the following.
My example wasn't emotional, Paul, it was fact. OTOH your implied involvement of a schoolbus full of kids in an aviation accident is somewhat over the top.
It's a CAVOK day unlimited VIS, at 500 feet you can see the rwy and all taxi ways are clear but you can't get a word in or have a radio failure. Why on earth complicate everything with a go around? Some of you are saying that in an emergency it is fine to continue and land. Of course it is. Are you any less liable in an emergency than you are on a normal approach?
I agree, you're the pilot in command, ultimately responsible for the safe conduct of your flight. Make your decision, but do not make it lightly and without considering all of the circumstances. I suggest that resisting "ANAL RETENTIVENESS" does not cut the mustard.
To be fair I quoted an unfavourable, though real, situation. On the other hand, you have quoted a very favourable one. Most situations in real life will lie somewhere in between. Where do you draw the line? CAVOK can be 8/8 blue and 50km vis. It can also be uniform grey overcast at 5000ft with 10km vis in same coloured grey murk - in fact, that is the more likely "CAVOK" at the airport where I work. What are you going to see in that vis against that background? What if it's 1500 ft ceiling and 5000m - that's VMC - cripes, it's hard enough for us and we're stationary with big windows and binoculars.
As I see it, my landing clearance is a kind of safety contract between you and me. When I issue it, I'm saying to you
"I think it's safe for you to land if you do".
If I didn't think it was safe I wouldn't say it. If you don't think it's safe, you won't accept it.
The absence of my half of the safety contract means there is no contract - for whatever reason I have not been able to assess the safety of the landing area
and communicate that assessment to you.
You are correct - what you do then is up to you, as pilot in command. It may indeed be safer for you to land, and if that is your assessment, that's what you should do. If it's not, then clearly you should go round. Easy.
At my workplace either event will result in an incident report. It's not punitive - the purpose is to find out why the landing clearance was not issued and that would be an internal investigation within ATC at my location with feedback into Airservices' safety system.
On the aircrew side, ATSB automatically gets a copy of the incident report and, if your company has a safety information sharing agreement with Airservices, so would they. (We have no discretion in that, the addressing is computer-controlled, automatic and not editable.) If you went around, that's SOP and it's unlikely there'd be follow-up action with you unless you submitted your own report for whatever reason. If you elected to land without the landing clearance, then that would be in the report and ATSB would follow that up and you would be able to explain why landing was safer than a go-round.
I am not having a go at any of you people. I just think we could engage in a bit of constructive dialogue and actively pursue some healthy debate about some of our procedures. I don't for one second condone many of the practices o/s. However that said, some places do have some very good procedures and I think we are burying our head in the sand if we think we do it better than everyone else. Whether we like it or not we are far too ANALY RETENTIVE and politically correct for our own good.
I think there's been a fair bit of constructive dialogue, so I think you've achieved you aim, Paul.
I do agree that some of our procedures are restrictive. As in any discipline, you will find people that "work to rule", but I suggest that the more common situation is that a controller will find a rule or procedure or interpretation that enables him to legally work around a restrictive situation if it is safe to do so. Problem is that when he gets busy the extra complication and workload may preclude that option. So yes, I agree, get rid of the cluttering crap.
On this issue of landing clearances, though, I don't think there's any crap in the Aus way - I may be naive, but I can't think of a better way to do it.
Lets keep the debate constructive. If you want to have a sledge I will down at the breaky creek hotel on Fri afternoon so we can discuss it over a beer.
I'm not interested in sledging, just the discussion will do. But the Brekky Creek sounds fine, it's just a bit far to drive
Cheers
AA