PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Bit of a barney with ATC today, what would you have done?
Old 30th Mar 2016, 09:59
  #45 (permalink)  
Genghis the Engineer
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Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: UK
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The other very valuable point here is VFR pilots inadvertently straying into, or towards, instrument patterns.

At Grenada there's actually a very useful clue - a VOR aligned with the main runway screams IAP at you, and it's obvious to most people that there's likely to be instrument traffic in that vicinity - if there's any at-all. This may often not be the case however - not all charts show all NDBs, or an approach may be aligned with a beacon the other side of the airport (or slowly, they are GPS based, which means that standard charts may tell you nothing at-all).

The UK/ICAO chart chevvron tells you little of value, as it's only shown for the ILS on one runway normally, and tells you nothing about the likely location of holding or outbound/base/departing IFR traffic, nor whether there are approaches on more than one runway.

There would be a lot of value (and yes, I know that our charts are quite cluttered enough already!) in some symbology on standard VFR charts that just shows where instrument traffic is most likely to be.

A parallel in the UK is the MATZ - shown on charts, it's where high energy military traffic is most likely to be around military airfields, it's not mandatory to avoid it - but we all know that at the very least asking for a MATZ penetration before entering that is a very good idea. Something "MATZish" around the standard holds and outbound/inbound tracks of IAPs shown on the chart, that gives VFR traffic a caution, would in my opinion be useful and support safety.

VFR pilots, who are (or have) hold/held IFR qualifications will at least understand the issues and know where to look for this information - but "vanilla" VFR pilots do not, and in any case, having it all on the single VFR chart makes more sense than not.

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