Mods, this is another moan directed at ASA, its not finger pointing exercise, more a fact finding moan as I'm trying to fathom the ineptitude of what I recently experienced.
Scene setting...
Big airways mega-cruiser approaching the end of its 13hr journey from its sandy furnace home base going to a pleasant Southern Australian destination.
Mega-cruiser has been in Australian airspace for 7 1/2 hours and has via CPDLC (datalink) been dutifully reporting ETA's and such.
5 minutes before computed TOD the lovely lady on the wireless issues the expected STAR clearance with a requirement to cross an intermediate waypoint....
10 minutes!!! after the original eta.
Needless to say, I suffered sense of humour failure and ATC were advised that this was impossible, and would they like us to hold.
Order was restored after extensive/expensive vectoring to allow the various Saab 340's etc do their thing.
Needless to say I'm utterly flabbergasted that a first (cough cough) world ATC system can be this disorganised such that they advised us of the need to lose so much time with so little warning, I can live 2, 3, 4, 5....30 minutes if I'm given notice, but 5 minutes before TOD? not acceptable IMHO.(At destination there was no bad weather..disabled aeroplanes..navaid issues or closed runways)
Anyone got any thoughts?
BTW, not a slight on any controllers per se, we work with imperfect systems in an imperfect world, given that, how can this be allowed to happen if ASA are supposed to be a service provider?
Thoughts appreciated!
H1
