To ianchanda, while seeking help and tips from your seniors and people with more experience than yourself is good and infact encouraged in any endeavour you should also take such advice with your own discretion. One simple example is the word ‘confirm’ above, from the first post of voxpopuli it may have seemed the word is a strict no-no though somewhat watered down in his explanation later on down the post
Pilots are generally amiable folks though arrogant lol (I like that in a pilot) – top gun, I believe? Anyway back to topic, most pilots would not want to offend the guy at the other end of the line if at all possible so it may seem voxpopuli may be putting it a little too mildly with –
Main_dog, I agree that the odd confirm has its place but when every second pilot from the sub-continent uses it, it starts to grate on your nuts a bit.
If the atco guys are putting up with various pilot types during the course of one day duty the pilot also has to put up with almost the same thing in the course of one flight thru several airspaces; some atco’s are really a nice break talking to after 7 or 8 hours of boring night flight however some are downright arrogant and unprofessional.
As with atco’s pilot too come from different regions of the world and therefor with different accents and speaking styles though every pilot would have been trained in correct radio telephony. That is simply regional or local way of speaking English and everybody should simply accept the differences and realise that none of us is perfect
Personally I have had the displeasure of getting thru a few firs of the second type although not all atco’s in any one fir are the same. One such fir is the ooms fir where at least one atco there is arrogant and unprofessional to say the least. And ianchanda take note since you will pass thru ooms. Now I have been flying thru most firs on most continents except the arctic and Antarctic but have not seen any that can beat ooms in terms of arrogance and unprofessionalism and am pretty sure other pilots have come across this as well in ooms although may not want to say it out. It seems as if they forgot who is here for who and also the fact that we are the customers and paying for the service.
If it was attributed to them being busy, I have seen busier airspaces in Europe and north America but still atc there can maintain normal civility on the air and still get the job done
There have been occasions where the ooms atc would simply rant out to the pilot for simple mistakes or missing out some elements in the readback instead of just correcting. Other times atc would simply descend a long haul overflight a/c without giving any reasons and when queried the replied was a curt “this is my airspace just do as I say” or ignoring the query totally. While it is totally understandable that atc would normally have reasons it would also be worth to note that pilots also need to operate within some bounds of safety comfort and economy, but this fact seems to have been lost on them. There was also a time when one pilot unfamiliar with the area asked to say again the name of a waypoint and got the reply “check your flt plan before asking” in an impatient tone. There were other cases from conversations with other pilots but too much to rant out here
Sorry ianchanda if I may have hijacked the thread but just thought you should know.
Safe flights