Originally Posted by slim_slag
Take one of your cursory glances at a chart of any class B area in the States and you will see there are plenty of airports very close together indeed, they make the UK look quite inconsequential. You find small and large airplanes mixing it quite happily, each respecting the rights of the others to use a common airspace. I bet only LHR would definitely make class B if it was in the US, and yet wouldn't come close to the top 10 busiest in the States.
There was a very interesting discussion on here recently comparing the size of the LHR surface area with the size of the surface area of several busier airports in the US. What it appeared to boil down to is that at LHR, you have A340s which simply cannot climb very well and so gazillions of square miles of very usable airspace is closed off to small aircraft. Yet you put that same A340 at O'Hare and the thing is quite capable of getting smartly off the ground and out of the way of the many small aircraft safely buzzing around a few miles off the departure end of the runway. Seems like they just cannot be bothered in teh UK, and the controllers let them get away with it. In the States I suspect the Chicago controller would be on the radio telling the A340 jock exactly what was expected of him. As it should be.
I suppose it's only to be expected in the UK where ATC is simply underresourced and can hardly handle the commercial traffic, and airline pilots can get in the right seat of a jet with no idea of how GA really works.
Do I imagine all the light a/c transitting the London Zone and the airfields that lie inside the Zone that can operate with no reference to Heathrow ATC and used by aircraft without transponder or radio?
Would non-transponder equipped aircraft be allowed to operate in the same proximity to an airport as busy as Heathrow in the States? No, there would be a compulsory Mode C veil.
Within the limits of the class of the airspace there's a lot of light aircraft activity in the London Zone, I see it every day. The grass may be slightly greener over the pond, but not as bright a hue as many would have you think.