YYZ ATCOs PLZ...?
Hello,
Was in Toronto airport three days ago where heavy fog prevailed throughout the morning hours.
Got the assignment to taxi form deice pad to 06L, then close to twy M, got the word from ground to taxi to rwy 05, as the CAT III appch needed is now to be used with rwy 06 instead of 05 as was used earlier.
A few questions about that and canadian operations in general, to the humble (non understaning) american pilot:
1) What's all this about CAT III now needs a diff rwy?? What's the difference, why not continue using the same rwy you have up until that point as moving all the tfc to the other side of the airport during low vis ops seems like a massy thing to do?...
2) Why do Canadian airports specify on ATIS the level of precision of the approach (i.e RUNWAY 05 CATEGORY III ILS APPROACH...) what diff, does it make to you guys which CAT will an airplane take an ILS to...?
3) The biggest thing I couldn't understand is why in YYZ, low vis ops, turn the airport into a one rwy for landing, one rwy for takeoff and render one runway useless??? Why not use all three for everything as you would on a normal day... Please elaborate.
A couple other questions not really related to the low vis ops but to YYZ in general:
1) Why do you not publish twr/grd freqs depicting which sector controls what side of the field...? Why is the Canadian method based on GRD telling me which TWR freq to call and vice versa? (same with twr telling me which of the two dep freqs to use...? why not part of PDC/Clearance?)
2) The last and final question. Lester 7 depicts initial altitude of 5000 ft. Cannot remember a single time I took off without being reassigned 3000 on departure by tower before takeoff... please explain why? why not revise SID?
All in all, great job you guys did on that morning. Very calm and cheerful attitude during the whole time, great job on getting us all out of there safely and quickly.
Thanks!
-downwindabeam