Scran - It looks a little bit as though your mind is closed. You state
I was a professional controller, and I could quite easily control aircraft as a Tower Controller without having airspace to the Control Zone Boundary
Scran, that is probably because the approach controller was holding the aircraft orbiting endlessly over the ocean at the wreck or at Nobby’s.
Capn Bloggs – if cancelling IFR and being given traffic on another aeroplane which is about five miles away at 500 feet over the water when you are coming in from the west does not give adequate “protection”, how would the same air ambulance pilot and people like yourself fly every day into non-controlled airfields in Australia?
As I mentioned previously in this thread – when the Williamtown control zone is not active and it is a C-TAF, I have never once heard of an airline pilot requesting that a VFR pilot hold somewhere in the lane.
Traffic information is passed and in this particular case the air ambulance aircraft would have headed in and landed and the VFR aircraft would have headed up the coast at 500 feet.
You seem to think that once air traffic control is involved that we must go to some type of archaic, kindergarten-type level of separation.
ozbusdriver – no, I don’t want Class D airspace. I simply want Class C as it is used internationally where the tower “owns” the airspace to the first control boundary step.
The AOPA meeting with the RAAF and their little chat has had no measurable effect. All that was about the RAAF hierarchy working out ways to operate the system more efficiently without changing any rule or 1930s regulations. That is just not possible!
By the way, no-one has answered a most important question.
At the present time when the airspace is activated at Williamtown for some civilian traffic it is normally activated to a 25 nautical miles radius at ground level. Why is this necessary when Sydney airport operates twenty-four hours per day with ground level airspace only going to 4 nautical miles in the east and 8.5 nautical miles in other directions?