Do ATCO’s self assess their R/T performance ?
After many thousands of hours monitoring ATC frequencies as a ‘bystander’ and even a couple hundreds of hours in the air long time ago, I wonder if many ATCO every now and then, record the transmissions on the frequency they’ve been handling for later self-evaluation. And do pilots give sometimes (off-frequency) friendly advice on how to improve the ATCO’s RT performance.
Let me clarify by 2 actual examples where self-assessment of RT comms could improve their overall RT performance :
1) An ATCO of a small regional airport, who is known personally by almost every pilot in the area, is such a calm speaker, that his voice could calm down a pilot even after failure of engine #1 in a C-172. But by being so relaxed, his RT transmissions, after the actual ‘to the point’ instructions/clearances, are regularly followed by one or more seconds of vocal silence, continuing the rest of the RT often proposing the pilot other, better alternatives options. And this vocal silence in the middle of the ATCO’s transmissions, causes many pilots to start their readbacks too early, resulting most of the time in the ATCO missing part or all of the readback.
2) In the age of the mobile phone, it seems that many (of the younger??) ATCOs nowadays have the mobile in their pocket. And as probably many of you have already noticed, mobile phones close to radio’s, telephones and even clock radio’s tend to interfere every now and then with their digital transmissions (dididi – dididi sounds). And that’s exactly what I hear on occasions, that the ATCO’s transmissions is partly suppressed by the digital interference of the mobile phone. Recently a take of clearance “callsign WIND 120 DEGREES 7 KNOTS RUNWAY 11 CLEARED FOR TAKE OFF” was almost completely unreadable by the digital sound upto the ..EARED FOR TAKE OFF, causing the lined-up pilot to request a say-again
As I remember from my personal ‘airborne’ time, the person transmitting is unaware of bad mike quality, background noise, bad mike handling techniques, etc. So listening to ones recorded RT activities is often very ‘revealing’.