Once again the poor but honest Flow is, rightly or wrongly, being maligned.
Flow control in CS is a bit of a black art, given the terrain, runway and taxiway restrictions, mix of traffic and often arcane company requirements.
For anyone, apart from the person who flowed the sequence in question, to try and explain it is probably futile.
For the benefit of those who may not have seen them posted before, here are general rules of Flow as it applies in Cairns and everywhere else.
Rules for successful flow control
1. Don’t trust pilots
2. Don’t trust sector controllers
3. Don’t trust tower controllers
4. Don’t trust anyone else
5. Develop a thick skin
6. Never back a Twin Otter to beat anything, even another Twin Otter
7. Never worry about departures, they are the tower's problem
8. Pray that the management pilots have good FOs
9. Computer Derived Threshold Times will be accurate only if the captain throws the computer out the storm window as he overflies the threshold in the go-round after being too intimate with the aircraft in front
10. All pilots think that they should be Number 1
11. Cardboard Bandeirantes can be used to hide unexplained gaps in the sequence
12. Unless they build more runways the maximum number of aircraft that can land at an airport in a given time will remain the same, despite the wetdreams of airline schedulers
13. Have faith in your own ability, no-one else does
14. Same money, right or wrong
15. If you believe the tower controller who says that the runway works will be finished prior to the start of the next sequence, you deserve all you get
16. Your are only as good as your last sequence
17. If your last sequence was not good, see above
18. Keep slipping the odd joke to the approach controllers, it keeps their mind off what is coming up
19. One day you will get a trainee who merely triples your workload
20. Never sit in approach and work your own sequence
21. Always keep a false nose or wig in the car, an angry mob waiting outside the carpark is not a pretty sight
22. The flow is never wrong, The flow is merely acting on information that may now be superseded.
sep