This is my first "season", so I haven't seen the busiest it can get yet, but so far, into LGW it's been short dog legs before feed-in, and always a continuous descent. The judgement call for me has been in getting rid of energy (757), and when to plan the descent point - an early call from ATC about likely routeing obviously helps, but the ATC service has been really slick so we've not had to burn any extra fuel. I imagine the dogleg technique makes it easier for a controller to see in plan form when to come off the dog leg for sequencing, rather than off a stack. It is great if you're always in a descent, but obviously if the legs too long then you'd have to level off and use fuel. If the leg's too long (how can legs be too long?!!!) then it would have been better to be up in the stack with lower fuel burn. I guess that's where the controllers judgement comes in. Am I right?
There's stuff I don't know about here, but I'd like to visit the ATC to see it from their point of view, and learn their side of it.
What I've learnt from this thread is to make sure there's plenty of the go juice when recovering at LGW at the busy times. So far I've had good guidance from my capts on when it gets busy at LGW (one of them used to be a controller but wanted an easier life!)
Anyhow, I'm impressed at how they do their job.