I am not saying that ATC can be exempt from any sort of responsibility here. What I was asking was why does this happen, it seems fair to me, to say that it is written clear enough on the STAR charts, however, after discussions with a colleague of mine who works one of the London sectors that aircraft may talk to on arrival into Heathrow, I was informed that on occasion the controllers may say 'cleared (insert STAR here) for landing R27 L'. Now, maybe this is confusing to some pilots, as it seems a sort of onward clearance has been given. That will have to be looked into from our side. However, my colleague did say this was given just as an information aid, and it was only the odd ATCO that did this as far as he was aware.
Intruder:
Yes, you are right, and we do tell pilots the rough estimates of how long they are expected to hold. Usually they are informed this by the first London sector they reach, and then retold again and again until they come into contact with the guy who works the holding stack. My bugbear here is that I have heard colleagues of mine tell an aircraft, 'expect a 10 min delay at ...' but the aircraft still ploughs through the hold. An EAT is a totally different matter... an EAT is the time at which there is holding expected of over 20mins, and it is the time that the aircraft can expect to leave the holding facility to commence an approach to land'. Our rules are such that if delays are over 20 minutes, then we have to give the aircraft an EAT. Furthermore, ATCO's are just as responsible for any mistakes we make due to incorrect clearances etc etc. There are consequences if we make mistakes aswell.
Del Prado, as a fellow ATCO I am quite surprised to hear you say that. If you are TMA then you know more often that not that we hold rather high at some of the stacks. Shall we just change the highest release level to more than FL120 and let LL DIR deal with all the aircraft holding high and en-route?
Overall though, for me, this has been quite a learning exercise. It is very interesting to see the differing opinions, obviously us in the UK have slightly different procedures to the rest of the world, however, this may be due to the relative complexity and small amount of airspace with so many airfields in it. I guess the STAR charts are supposed to take any ambiguity away as to whether you should hold or not, they obviously don't. So a question then, if you are inbound to an airfield on a busy frequency, you can kind of guess that it might be busy, if you haven't been told to hold by the ATCO working you, and you are approaching the clearance limit point, then surely, a quick 'London, we are approaching BIG/OCK/BNN/LAM, are we to take up the hold' is surely the most common sensical thing? It is quite a scary thought to read that there are quite a few pilots out there who would be willing to fly through airspace without a clearance in such a busy section of airspace, just because the ATCO hadn't reinforced what is written down on the sheet in front of them. I understand, people make mistakes, we are human after all, ATCO's not reinforcing that you should hold = mistake, pilots ploughing straight through someone elses airspace because they havent read the STAR sheet properly = mistake, however, it has started to become a fairly common occurrence just recently, which was why i posed the question in the first place.