O55166K
There is also a phrase in MATS part 1 - one of the very first pieces of text which states (and I am paraphrasing here) "Nothing in this manual shall preclude an ATCO from using his or her judgement" etc etc etc.
We are talking about one piece of phraseology here - how many unstandard phrases do you use in a day?
"resume standard speed" is widely used in TC, whether that is correct phraseology or not is by the by, it's a fact. It is used, it works, end of.
As for the difference between the different types of speed - I take your point, but will amplify it further. You have IAS (Indicated), RAS (Rectified), TAS (True) and finally GS (Ground Speed).
Below 300kts due to the compressibility of air, you can miss out one of the steps in the calculation of how to get from IAS to GS.
As you can see, I do know the difference between IAS and GS.
To say -
my buddies and I in Area Control will never give you traffic above the agreed speed without co-ordination.
is quite frankly laughable. Now I do not want this to progress into a slanging match because I know that we do things that hack you off, and being in the same building as each other will hopefully make things better as we can have better 2 way dialogues.
Hand on heart, every day I am working I either get aircraft doing greater than 300kts -
as reported by the pilot, or as a coordinator I have one of my controllers moan about it. (And as I am more than aware that you know, pilots will report Mach number or IAS NOT Ground speed)
Normally, it does not matter too much, as long as we get the A/C early enough. What does P*** us off is when it is patently obvious that we are holding and it still happens. I appreciate that our holds are background traffic to you, but you can still see the A/C going round the hold. It's all about appreciation of what is going on outside of a controllers particular task (the bigger picture).
As I said, I do not want to start a slanging match as we could swap posts about what each unit does wrong for months - I am just putting it down because of your quote above.
99 times out of 100 we will not phone to complain, because frankly, if we are holding, we are invariably busy - therefore we have bigger fish to fry. Maybe if we did it would become apparent to you how often it actually happens.
Also, even if you do not give a pilot a specific speed above 300kts to fly, saying to him or her "maintain high speed" is, in essence, breaking the coordination because it is an instruction and although it gives the pilot a chance to choose the speed, it may well still break the 300kt rule!!
Perhaps that is our problem at both ends - we do not phone and complain enough. I do not believe there is enough understanding of the problems faced by either sets of controllers. Again, this may be redressed a bit when we move down.
It would be nice if when we do move down, the management were to get the watches that work together and give them some money to go down the pub and chat to each other and get to know each others problems etc (work problems wise - I am no social worker) - It would be a hell of a lot more effective and infinitely cheaper than doing TRM which is a lot of management speak and buzz words and is basically common sense and an insult!! (In my opinion). But obviously that is not gonna happen.
Brownstar-
055166Ks explanation regarding your point b] is correct and is the same as mine, but probably put in a more lucid and understandable way (my head was spinning at the time!). Hopefully between the 2 answers, you have found what you were looking for.