A great thread. The suggestion on flight deck famils has been brought up many times. 9/11 put the stoppers on the limited famils we had prior to then. CX have already agreed to ATC famils, however it’s taking time to get the program up and running. Apart from the usual nuggets of security and fuel charges, there is the logistics of ticketing & insurance. Is the requested flight a training flight? Is it a day return and is the flight to be done during duty hours or in the controllers own time? As we have a shortage of controllers and they are at the airport 22 to 23 days out of every month, I can see problems on arranging famil flights on what is possibly their only day off in 9 days of duty. Having said that, we do have many who would do it if available.
At the moment, we have a program in place with Dragonair for our student ATCs only. They do a famil when about half way through their on-the-job training for their rating validation and are required to write a report and submit it to me on what they learned from the famil that will assist them in their ATC duties. This is working well and we thank Dragonair for their help and arrangements. We hope to extend this to other controllers when we can. (Without the report writing)
You have to remember, as FlexibleResponse said, we both have a job to do. Your priorities are different to ours. You want the best possible operation and least delay for your aircraft whereas we want the best operation and least average delay for all aircraft.
I know that Bedder believit, like me, has probably a couple of hundred hours on flight decks. How many hours have you all had sitting next to an Approach controller or Tower controller to see what their problems are? I’ve been in ATC for nearly 39 years & the longest I have ever had a pilot sit with me plugged in with a headset is 10 minutes.
I see that this as a two way operation. The only pilots we have visit us is the CX command courses. This is great, but we need your Check & Training Captains to visit. Only that way are we going to get a better understanding of OUR problems filtering through the system. As notified before, the HKATCA has a visit program on the 3rd Saturday of each month. Volunteers, (in their own time), will give a briefing and show you around ATC for about 3 hours. There should be a notice on the crew notice board with my email address. Just contact me and I will make the arrangements. Much better than slagging it out on pprune.