Okay, boys and girls
Let me make a couple of things a little clearer.
I am at no stage advocating going against rules & regs nor ATC by Rumour.
I was in NO way advocating pilots terminate two-way with the ATC center to go to the CTAF, can I make that any clearer.
Thats why I said it would be a courtesy, a nicety if you like, not a requirement (my thread title may have been misleading). How much trouble is it for a pilot just to say we are monitoring the CTAF or something like that if it makes life easier for everyone.
As for the time limits before alerfa/incerfa initiated Airservices has a list of times for various scenarios. Say sartime for arrival, you have 10mins to cancel sarwatch with ATC before we enter the comcheck phase (as mentioned inearlire post) and 5 mins after that it becomes an INCERFA (assuming no contact has been established or confirmation the aircraft has landed). Other scenarios follow the same sort of procedure. sked call I covered earlier (and includes ATC call, Ops Normal time, position reports).
As for not answering ATC, next time I'm in work Im going to ignore aircraft for 13mins and then answer, see what happens?. I wonder how long before the pilots get frustrated?
Because believe it or not we are doing other things than just waiting for calls - drawing up SIGMET maps, attending to telephone coordination, flightplan amendments, documentation, conflict resolution. We regularly have 3-4 frequencies in use with multiple calls on each.
And lets take another couple of examples, who here (pilot wise) likes direct tracking? And guessing most do, under Airservices policy ATC are not to give direct tracking under any circumstances unless to avoid a confliction. So as we give quite a lot of direct tracking do you want me to stop MHA?
And, secondly common sense does have to prevail sometimes over following exactly to the line what the books say (assuming safety is not compromised in anyway) If you guys have an emergency or an issue we theoretically have a list of about 50 questions we should ask pilots. We dont normally go through the whole list, only the ones pertinent to the situation. But next time you have a pan call you want me to spend half an hour eliciting info I will.