Requested cruising level
Because of some electronic jiggery pokery at our gleaming new centre at Swanwick, we are, if we are the first NERC sector, supposed to ascertain the requested cruising level of a flight on first contact (this sometimes differs from the filed level). If we don`t do this, the succeeding sectors may be wrongly targetted by the electronics.
Can someone explain why the answer is very often "Standby". I would have thought this would have been known some time before the aircraft got airborne, but apparently it is still an unknown factor when the aircraft is passing FL200 for some crews.