hi Broadlands, in reply to your original question
An interesting view from the BGA. Don't quite agree with the tone though, or that using the radio is a distraction.
Any comments/views?
I think its a well written letter and vey sensible.
Using the radio can be a distraction for a glider pilot flying cross country as the soaring part of the flight does use up a lot of the available mental energy, add to that the navigation which is constantly being re-planed as the flight progress to maximise the time spent in the "good air" i.e up-going. Glider flights tend to be constantly changing altitude which brings different bits of controlled airspace in to play and requires a lot of attention not to infringe airspace. When less than half cloud base glider pilots need to split their attention between soaring and working out how and where to land if the need arises. If those tasks are not enough there is the need to constantly look out and some "domestic" in cockpit issues that longer flights require..The flights tend to be on average around 5 hours long which also saps brain energy, thats quite a long time to concentrate. Compared to other types of flying the work load is very high. Imagine flying a light aircraft and being instructed to climb and descend continuously and divert 30 degrees right for 15 miles then released to own nav before being instructed to change track again and find the frequencies of all ATC units on the varying route....Glider pilots also monitor the gliding frequencies and get useful information on the air ahead so do need to prioritise on monitoring that. But it is appropriate to call or monitor any ATZs we go near and occasionally ask for a clearance through CAS.
Personally I monitor 2 frequencies most of the time but while transiting Oxford recently the controller was doing radar, tower and ground at the same time, much as I wanted to get an idea of where other traffic was I had to leave the frequency as the noise was excessively distracting, especially as I had switched box 2 to Benson, hence it would be useful to educate that controller that he should only do 1 task on the frequency , radar, if he wants to get more gliders participating.
Many controllers do want to hold on to us as long as possible even if they have no useful info to give us and insist on knowing where we came from, where we are going, no of people on board and type etc when all many of us want to do is announce our presence and intentions on the frequency , this does add to our work load and distracts from look out.
Very few controllers understand how to work with gliders so I find the workload on the radio when gliding rather than power flying requires a lot more thought on my part and it becomes hard to explain to some controllers that I can't maintain an altitude or heading easily, even reporting my position is an issue as my gliding nav equipment is in Km s rather than nm s and I don't always have VORs in my database, I guess I could give my position from a BGA way point in kms but that probably wouldn't be much use to a controller or powered pilot?
Basically many glider pilots do call and the letter encourages others to do more, but, it is a distraction than needs to be managed and controller training would help. The BGA has offered to send pilots to the various ATC training colleges and not many have taken up the offer
bb