Originally Posted by
Roger Standby
I have since had reason to ask pilots up to 3 times "confirm assigned niner thousand" and received"affirm, nine thousand". After the third time you're banging your head and assuring yourself that you did in fact hear "nine".
If this is what you call bad R/T, then the standards in some parts of the world out there would make you cut your wrists. It so happens that Australian ATC is held as the epitome of uptight, anal ATC. Even the Europeans think we are uptight and anal here just because we have standards. It's an amazing mindset when you hear them whinging about it.
Personally, I have no problem with the expectation that an R/T operator merely observes proper radiotelephony procedures but what you find from other parts of the world is:
- no callsign after initial call
- no readbacks
- readbacks of EVERYthing
- use of "any chance of" instead of "request"
- use of "okay, understand, code #### comin' down.... "
- Reply with "Roger, squawking Ident" (but no callsign) when told to squawk Ident......
- and much, much more...... you get the idea.
Asking most of these halfwits to repeat so you can hear them say "niner' instead of "nine" will do nothing but convince them Aussie ATC are a bunch of twaats and/or confuse them into shutting up altogether.
I'll be sure I use "niner". I just wish the rest of the world could get their sh!t together too.
Meanwhile, why is this:
The old fade-out when advising QNH or next freq - EG:
" ### contact ML Centre on
one three three decimal......", or
" ### area QNH
one zero one......."
Try to get your own procedures squared away while you're at it!!