Hello Chaps/Chapesses,
Excuse a mere pilot butting in here, but I've obviously upset one of you, and it's going to cost me beer if I can't clear it up!
I got MOR'ed by one of the 'Directors' At LHR the other day, and I've been called into the office to expain myself.
The scene..... BNN hold. Long night flight from the W coast of the US of A coming to an end. We thought.
Weather..... lovelyish.
Fuel ...... OKish.... Just about. We have a new fuel flight planning system in BA that is even meaner than the old one with trip fuel. Some of the 15mins contingency fuel almost always goes en-route for lots of reasons. I could enlighten you further, but you might die of boredom. LGW is the alternate, but if you are banished to a hold that option usually disappears after one or two turns. Fine .... if the EAT is reasonable. We 'commit' to LHR, and assuming the EAT is met we run down the fuel in the hold to land with Reserve fuel as a very minimum. For the uninitiated Reserve fuel is best described as 'guage error' fuel. In other words, you can't guarantee it's there.
So an 'assured landing' is now important to us.
The other dal I had 3.5 tonnes on top to play with. Not much in a 747-400. Not enough for the 40 track miles to landing I was offered last time I did a go-around at LHR due to inadequate spacing on 09L. (ATC initiated go-around in that case).
Once bitten..... etc. I politely tried to intimate to the Director after leaving BNN, that it would be a good idea all round if we didn't have to do a go-around from this approach. ie.... please can we have another mile between us and the preceding a/c, or so?
This immediately appeared to get his back up. What would our intentions be in the event of a go-around, I was asked. A very quick return was the answer.
So he MOR'ed me.
Now this is where I need help. I thought from my visits to you at LATCC, (pretending to be the 'emergency' on your Sim recently, for instance), that forwarning is everything. That is what I was trying to do. If I had done a go-around, an emergency (possibly) would have had to have been declared.
I'm sure that this would have caused you and us no end of grief and paperwork.
Question?. Would you have preferred me to keep quiet and spring a mayday on you on the go-around if the 2.5 miles was not quite enough in the end? Because if you are going to MOR us like this then you will be getting a lot more suprises in the future.
AND we can insist on spacing if we want, you know. I don't want to get snotty, we all have to make this (very) imperfect LHR thing work if we can, and to a large extent we work for each other on a day to day basis, but which way do you want it to play it boys and girls?
I'll play it anyway you like, but I'm not going to run out of fuel to give HAL 2.5 mile spacing. We pay them for the landing, they pay you to facilitate it, doesn't that make us the customer?
Contentious? Moi?
Answers please, on a letter bomb to......
ANTIGUA
C744
