Got us there, yes...
Whatever next, white crooks co-operating with black crooks!
Most of us posting here, I think, are low-level guys. Not that we are pillars of virtue, just that we do not usually have the chance to pervert the system to line our pockets even if we wanted to.
It is not that we want to zing the poor old Africans, as if to say that they are the only ones to make a mess of things but here it is the African system under discussion.
If you get told, every bl**dy day, to "Squawk Alfa XXXX..." because this dozy git thinks "Alfa" means "Altitude," well, this sort of thing does engender a certain attitude towards African ATC and Africans in general.
What, you mean "Charlie" refers to altitude and "Alfa" refers to the numerical code itself? How does that make any sense? (It beats me but it is so and you could look that up for yourself if you could find a copy of the relevant ICAO publication in this hole of an office you inhabit with crap scattered everywhere.)
How often I would explain, chapter and verse, what ICAO had to say about this or that when I could literally see the information zizzing right through that thick skull like a neutrino or whatever those thingies are that can pass right through the Earth itself without even slowing down.
It was as if to ask, "Will knowing this make me a better, safer pilot?" (Yes, of course it will, you stupid git! We are not alone here in the African skies; there are many people here from other lands where they expect SARPS to apply. Boring stuff such as keeping that transponder on even when out of radar contact, so that the other crew's TCAS has a chance to prevent a mid-air.)
Followed closely by, "Will anything bad happen to me if I ignore this white clown and stick to the local way of doing things half-baked, the way I prefer to do them? (No, of course not; this is, after all "Your country!")
I had to point out this transponder business one afternoon to a crew from a rival company after we had a close one. This time we were in the clear and could see them busting an altitude right in front of us, when there was nothing showing on the TCAS. We asked, politely, ATC to ask them if they were, perhaps, squawking Oscar November there, when they suddenly appeared. Whoah, ju-ju!
So when I went over to tell them about this miracle, life-saving gizmo we had, the answer was, well, why should they turn on their transponder when they did not have TCAS themselves. You know, what diffo would it make to them?
I just stood there gawking at the sheer stupidity of this before gathering my thoughts to point out that it was usually so that both parties to a mid-air collision ended up dead, hmmm? "Oh, yeah, I guess so..." was the response, but I really don't know if they got my point or not.
Never mind SARPS, they had their own, time-honoured, local way of doing things. One more switch to flip, sigh... What is the point, when mid-airs are so rare?