Finding out circuit height in the UK
This is a rant, but I'm sort of hoping that somebody knows a better source of information than I do.
I'm just putting together a planning pack for myself for a 2 day trip: Cranfield - Exeter - Leeds Bradford - Cranfield. Usual stuff: PLogs, pages from Pooleys, booked handling, lines on charts - we're all trained in it.
One thing that occurred to me, because I am very poor at remembering it at any given airport on a given day, is circuit height. A really fundamental bit of information if you are planning a visual approach.
So my question is WHY do so many airports make this information so damned hard to find.
Cranfield - it's buried on page 2 of a 3 page Pooleys entry, thankfully at the bottom of the first page of the AFE VFR guide entry, page 7 (of 8) of the ICAO textual data and nowhere in the ICAO aerodrome chart (=the thing most likely to be open on my kneeboard).
Exeter, nope, just can't find it anywhere - not in Pooleys, not in the ICAO textual data, not in the AFE VFR guide.
Leeds-Bradford, in the ICAO textual data on page 8 (of 12) I find a reference to minimum height for training circuits, but nothing applicable to standard circuits; nothing in Pooleys, nothing in AFE.
Okay, this is only a snapshot of three airfields - but surely for anybody arriving VFR, this is a vital bit of information, that should be immediately to hand? And taking a sample of randome airfields through Pooleys, at-least 50% of airfields in there aren't immediately declaring a circuit height.
So, we either guess - which we shouldn't do, but I'll bet it happens a lot, or clutter up the RT asking (which I hardly ever hear), or what???
Am I missing something really simple, or should this just be part of the standard ICAO aerodrome plate, and then by extrapolation the standard commercial flight guides? And somewhere really obvious!
I am aware that in the USA there's a standard circuit height of 1000ft aal unless declared otherwise, but I don't *think* that exists here?
G