jack-oh:
why do you get so many more grumbles from GA ac about being restricted when flying VFR when recieving a service from the mil as opposed to civil.
In my experience of regularly flying VFR in Class G under a FIS from two nearby units, one civil, one military, it tends to come down to differences in phraseology.
The civil unit will invariably say: "advise if you wish to climb above XXXXft". Since I know that the reason for this is so he can descend IFR inbounds to 1000ft above, it is only in rare circumstances (e.g. under time pressure on a detail which requires climb to height e.g. stalling) that I will insist on the climb, knowing that to do so will force the controller to either keep the IFRs higher or vector them to maintain 3nm.
I should add that this civil unit has a very good record of providing radar-based traffic info to us when operating just outside their zone on a FIS.
At the military unit the FIS tends to mean no traffic info at all but when they have an IFR descending above they will say "c/s for co-ordination purposes request you operate not above XXXXft". Again, I almost always say yes to the request but there have been occasions when I have wished I didn't e.g. in the middle of some manoeuvring in a non-transponder aircraft and the controller asks me to maintain my heading and report that heading, then turn 30 degrees for ident, then he gets involved with some other traffic and doesn't speak to me for ages, then eventually by the time he's ID'd me the confliction's passed anyway. All a bit of a waste of time which the poor student is paying for - 5 mins of b***ering around instead of learning is an extra £10 on their bill at the end of the flight.
We have also had some controllers at this unit trying to issue avoidance vectors to our traffic operating VFR outside their MATZ. I suspect this stems from the difficulties of MATZs being effectively CAS for military traffic but open Class G to civil.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the military unit, just adding my experiences to the debate. I recognise that mil units operate in a very different environment with very different sorts of traffic.
NS