Originally Posted by
de facto
SOBs? You meant POBs?
An example of R/T from those discribed earlier as inexperienced proper R/T obsessed pilots.
Music to my ears..
Well I learned something today. "Climb to three and a half thousand" is the new correct way to tell ATC your altitude request, and I guess you have to wait until ATC tells you before you squawk 7700. I mean this is a UK airliner and they are of course the gods of radio telephony so they must be perfect...right
.
The one thing I don't understand is, although I know the UK operates some very odd aircraft I have never heard of one that requires "steam" to taxi.
The level of "emergency" you have when the stove goes out on a day with the weather clear and a million and a 6 knot wind,
after you have selected gear up and are in the second segment, is at an altogether different level then being faced from a smoke filled cockpit on final to a near minimums landing......
Don't get me wrong, the Thompson crew did a good professional job and are to be commended. But I frankly resent the implication that they would have handled the situation 5912 found themselves in any better simply because they were European and not American
I am hard over on this incident. The controller
failed in his duty. There was clearly ambiguity in his mind about whether an aircraft was in trouble or whether someone was spoofing the frequency and yet it appears he did nothing substantive to resolve the confusion. I don't think if the pilot had said Mayday 3 times anything would be different.
But I agree regardless of the jurisdiction, the best thing to do is to preface the first call with Mayday as that is universally understood and will get everyones attention. However I don't understand why the Thompson boys repeated it before every single transmission they made. Were they worried that ATC might had forgotten they had an emergency in the 11 seconds between each of the many, many radio transmissions they made
Finally I think the the biggest problem in aviation is not how pilots are alerting ATC to their problem, it is the fact that too many wait too long. Two pilots burned to death in their cockpit in a King Air which crashed just short of the runway at CYVR last year. If they had declared the emergency the fire trucks would have been 100 meters from the crash site instead of on the other side of the airport in the firehall.......