En-Route Holding
A thread for both ATC and pilots alike.
Over the last few days there have been several occasions where en-route holding for both Heathrow and Gatwick has taken place.
The questions I have is for the pilots flying into the TMA from the south via Akiki(UN867)/Gibso(UR8/H51).
For pilots, how much time do you need to enter the details into the FMS for a hold that isn't on the flightplan ie. at POMPI or BEWLI? The latter affects those via AKIKI that have a task to enter 4 more RP's to get into the hold as the traffic via GIBSO have BEWLI already entered. Does the FMS have potential holds already entered to just hit "enter" or is it a full input required? Its helpful to know this so if a last minute call is made to hold out then vectors will be initiated to bend you in for the correct entry giving you time to get the FMS set up adequately.
Also for the pilots, does it annoy you once we get you to enter an unusual hold (ie. off-route) and then cancel it just as you get there? It seems to be "Murphy's Law" that we always do this!
For the TC controllers, how much notice do you get yourselves that you don't have enough room at the inner stacks? I try as planner to look ahead and maybe give a call to initiate checking if I think its needed or we have a bunch on its way, but over the last few days some of the calls from yourselves have been a little on the late side limiting the options on en-route holding severely, especially for those that need to hold at fixes "off-route". We try to predict the situation but sometimes we just don't get the full picture, any ideas on how we can improve this?
Finally for the TC controllers, when you bring on the next inbound, how do you expect us to do this? Do you expect an immediate manouvre to get the a/c continued, or as the a/c has the EAT, do you not mind how much time we take to pull the a/c off and on into the TMA? Sometimes for us keeping it spinning can help out against the outbounds/other inbounds but I wondered if this compromised what plans the Co-ordinator had made?
I've copied this to the Questions forum just open it out into the Pilot 'massive' also.