Originally Posted by
Okavango
Hi. Passed my PPL a few months back and just starting to put in some hours and planning some adventurous XC's. Planning out routes and it's just bizarrely struck me what to do when transiting an airfield overhead. In training I'd always talked to any airfield I passed though this became part of standard procedure for the local area I was used to. I remember my instructor saying you don't have to talk to anyone if you don't want (he wasn't advocating it - merely stating it). How do you handle zone transits in general - do you always make contact?
Well, at the very least it would just be common courtesy, and at best save you from coming face to face with something exciting happening in the overhead which was NOTAM'd, but you didn't actually get round to reading them...or you printed them out, but the cat ate them...or left them on the bus...that sort of thing.
Conington last weekend springs to mind. Fantastic support from the airfield for the aerobatics, but there is not a lot the people in the tower can do if someone decides to blithely sail through the overhead (and the competition box) in a particularly fat, dumb and happy state without bothering to call on the airfield frequency. Twice.