I 'm back from another day slaving over a hot radar.
It seems to me that in the world we live in where things go wrong one could never cover all the risks and operate efficiently enough to stay in business; therefore we have to be prudent.
The problem for me here is that I didn't know how things stood until too late. Frankly the extra 2 miles I gave him would have been no good if the traffic ahead had blocked the runway, it would have been a go around anyway. What I haven't yet said is that having replied "no" to the question from tower about fuel emergency the tower considered it unnecessary to send the preceding traffic around and so in the end he didn't get the "protection" that these circumstances DEMANDED. (I later wished I had insisted.)
How can "I cannot go-around" be reconsiled with "no fuel emergency"?
I would like to see the following as standard at LHR:
1. If when advised of your delay on first call you find yourself in the "ballpark" of a minimum fuel arrival I want to know about it. All you need say is "Roger, that will be close to a minimum fuel arrival".
2. If having been vectored off the stack you are in doubt about landing with minimum you declare a PAN and at that point I will take steps to ensure that you have sufficient space on the approach to switch to the other side should your landing runway become U/S. It would be something like an 8 mile gap instead of the 5 I gave here and a word to DEPS not to line too many up. Provided that nobody abuses the system I can see no problem with it. (And we would soon know if they were!)
I feel very strongly that traffic which is going to land on minimums has got to be treated differently to other traffic because we just don't know what might happen. Tower may have an emergency crossing of the runway, the surface may break up, your gear might not come down, you might get a configuration problem and need time to sort it, windshear. Why do we insist on gambling that nothing will go wrong?
May I finally repeat what I have said many times on these boards. Part of the problem here is capacity at Heathrow. We are a two runway airport handling three runway traffic and that fact is backing us into a dangerous corner.
Point 4
