(UK) Etiquette on service termination
Hi chaps,
I don't come in the ATC lounge very often, but I hope you'll forgve me barging in to ask a question.
I was on an average sized (~90minute) trip across the UK, VFR, in a single-pilot single at ~1500ft QNH (so below MSA, and around 1100ft agl). Weather and visibility started to deteriorate, so I asked the service working me, who I'd just joined, if they'd be happy for me to climb to an IFR level and upgrade from a basic to traffic service IFR. They were, and provided an excellent traffic service for which I was extremely grateful - certainly enhancing the safety of the flight as I was mostly in IMC, but at-the least now able to climb above MSA which I couldn't whilst maintaining VFR, and also there was certainly other traffic around - very little of which I saw.
40 miles or so further on, as I came towards the end of their area, in IMC, I got:-
"G-nn, service terminates, squawk 7000, suggest freecall xxxxxx for traffic information". (I may have the wording slightly wrong, but that's the gist.)
This was a bit of an irritant when already working fairly hard single-pilot IFR in IMC, in fairly crowded airspace, and preceded by no warning. At the very best, this was going to create an interruption in traffic information.
As the simplest solution and guessing correctly that the weather below me had improved somewhat I asked to stay with them until I'd descended back into VMC and then could return to VFR - which fortunately I could just before I descended below MSA. However, to my simple pilot's mind it was a tad unsatisfactory.
It seems to me that there were at-least three better ways ATC could have handled this...
(1) A handover (possibly to xxxxx, since I was not yet very close to my destination, which also was non-radar.)
(2) A warning before that point that they needed to cancel the service, and asked my intentions.
(3) A request whether I was VMC and/or able to accept a service cancellation before then making the next decision.
Possibly I'm being a little precious about this and certainly should have had a bit more of a prior plan about my next frequency - but knowing what it does to both a controller's workload and mine, deliberately climbing IFR into IMC was a deliberate safety decision (rather than stooging around low level VFR in marginal VMC below MSA as I had been earlier), and having that decision cancelled out leaving me with increased workload and reduced safety information at no notice, was mildly stressful.
Any thoughts from anybody who either controls IFR traffic, or has a lot more IFR experience than my fairly minimal 40 hours or so? Was this reasonable? Should I have declined the cancellation initially and asked for a handover? Can I even legitimately do that?
G