Weather Avoidance Problems
I know this has has been aired before... but just a polite reminder to crews that maybe one out of a hundred times when you want "ten left for weather" we can't let you because of traffic. (Traffic=big metal object which causes hurt if you hit it). I think the vast majority of pilots are aware of this and realise that we don't head them into bad weather just for fun and we will try to offer an alternative heading away from weather and metal objects whenever we can. As many of you will be well aware, the weather around the London TMA has been pretty dreadful lately and ATC has done everything possible to accommodate requests for different routings. As always, one crew wants constant changes of heading whilst others carry on as normal but we do the best we can and hope that most are reasonably satisfied. Lots of the track changes were pretty complex for us, eg 240 out of OCK for ten miles caused a lot of phone calls and frantic hollering between us and the TMA controllers, as did the guy who insisted on turning south straight through the ILS when everyone else was turning in underneath perfectly normall. At times that little window in the side of my head that reads my age was going round like a fruit machine!!
What doesn't help any of us are those few pilots who get distinctly sniffy on the rare occasions when we cannot let them do exactly what they want. For example, a coupla crews flying CPT SIDs out of Heathrow in the last few days..... (given 240 degrees to start with then we turn you on to 270ish to thread you between the traffic descending downwind for 09L and the traffic on the ILS). The guy it was my misfortune to talk to got very upset at the right turn I offered and said he wanted to turn left 20... at the time there was a slower descending a/c in his 10 o'clock at 3 miles, just a couple of hundred feet higher and the requested turn would certainly have caused a serious airmiss or worse. His comment "it's OK, we have it on TCAS" did NOT help as there is no provision for standard ATC radar separation to be reduced by TCAS derived information.
I can't comment fully on the other incident as I was not involved but I know that the pilot involved went on to bleat to the next controller about having been refused the heading he wanted by the Heathrow Director!
May the Good Lord deliver us from such people...