Oh dear, I’ll try to explain. You have accused a Britannia pilot of being a pompous hooray Henry. You made an assumption, you were wrong. That then started a lot of comments about how BY pilots are always asking for short cuts and if there is any speed control etc. Unfortunately some comments came from ATCO’s. In short your wrong accusation led to a slagging fest against BY pilots in general…all clear so far?
I then pointed out that in fact the CAA employed the pilot. I then used humour as a way of bringing to the more astute readers that as we are commercial pilots, part of our responsibility is to reduce operating costs. That means operating the aircraft in the most economical way possible. That means we do not drag it in, all dirtied up way out at 18 miles if we can avoid it. It also means that when appropriate we will always request any direct routeing available, which is IMHO the correct thing to do…still with me?
I also mentioned that the CAA pilot had been told by the previous controller that there was no speed control, i.e. he could fly faster than the published speeds for the arrival. From your comments the crew were surprised to be confronted by two aircraft out at 18 plus miles doing such a slow and uneconomical speed after they had been told that there was no speed control. Suddenly they had lots of energy that they had to lose. They were confronted with trying to slow down and descend at the same time, which can be difficult in a 757. Maybe they were a bit disheartened when the situation could have been avoided by being told that there was in fact standard speed control in force?
They should not have let the irritation become apparent on the RT with his comment as you allege. (It could have been an attempt at humour for all you know) But since you appear to have already made your mind up about his accent and drawn conclusions from the tone, rather that the spoken word, it might be that you were in fact wrong.
On a personal note, we are supposed to be professional pilots on this forum. Perhaps a professional way to deal with your concerns would have been to voice them to the relevant people in private. Instead you chose to behave like a petulant child on a public forum. FWIW, IMHO you have let yourself down and the rest of the professional pilots on this forum.
