Aer Lingus had to declare PAN to land in BCN on 14 March

[PPRuNeUser0176]

Incident: Aer Lingus A320 at Barcelona on Mar 14th 2012, fuel emergency (http://avherald.com/h?article=44df086f&opt=4097)

[Nimmer]

so whats the purpose of the thread???

[HEATHROW DIRECTOR]

ATCOs and pilots will recognise this as not too uncommon in RVR condtions. What puzzles me is why the CAT III runway wasn't being used in the first place, or have I misunderstood something?

[McNulty]

Only a matter of time before these cowboys cause a fatal accident. They need to all be sacked Reagan style.

[Denti]

They allways whine they cannot give any directs because they could be subject to a fine of up to 4 million euro. Well, i hope that fine will be applied in this case to the controllers responsible.

[ZOOKER]

Sounds like one location where FERRONATS ought to be.

[Tom the Tenor]

Cross reference this thread with the Strange Events Barcelona thread elsewhere on this forum. It also relates to events at Barcelona on 14th March, 2012.

[bullas]

I was flying that night into BCN and was in the hold at CLE with the Lingus.

Usual ops in BCN is 25R but you need 400m rvr to land and as it was down to 325m I explained to ATC that we needed 25L so we could do Cat 3 approach. They said no.. I informed them that if we couldn't land on 25L we would have to divert. As you would expect they didn't give a s**t.

All Navaids were serviceable, after about 5 -10 minutes in the hold we bugged out to LEGE, gave up asking for 25L it was like banging my head against a brick wall.

LEGE ATC were equally cack, put in the hold while diverting to them as well...used over a 1000kgs just going from CLE to LEGE!

Fortunately we diverted with fuel well above CNR as I could see it was about to kick off as the hold was getting busier with other aircraft asking the same questions to ATC, I think we were the first to give up and divert..quite glad we did really after reading the report.

Also to add to the fun, fog on the earlier TAFs was not expected..fortunately we got an updated one just before departing and gassed it up.

Safe flying

B

[HEATHROW DIRECTOR]

I know ATC gets the blame, but I can't believe it's the fault of the ATCOs. They must surely be working to specific local instructions..??

[Syntax]

HEATHROW DIRECTOR

I know you can't believe it. The "problem" with ATCOs such as yourself is that you see the world through a British perspective. You've been surrounded by British ATCOs; ATCOs who are genuinely interested in aviation, know their aircraft types, strive to be the best, are genuinely interested in their jobs, have generally outstanding professional attitudes and while they have beefs with their employers, they leave it at the door when they come to work.

These are people who wanted to be controllers first and not just public servants first because it meant they were secure for life regardless of wether they made any effort or not. People who had aptitude and had to compete for coveted positions. Not because they had family ties to those who recruited.

Now reverse all of the above and you are dealing with Spanish ATC.

This a video of controllers on active duty. Can you believe it? They were so proud of it they posted it to YouTube!:

C7Wt7DfugaA

Having lost a spat with their employers and trying to hold the country and the economy to ransom in an illegal strike they were brought to heel in an extremely abrupt fashion by the government who used a national state of emergency to force them back to work and had the military supervise them.

The next step was to find any obscure guidance or long forgotten rules and take the most obscure meaning from them and try to use these to deliberately slow traffic and create congestion that simply wasn't there. Then to deny any assistance and common sense help to expedite traffic: long winded SIDs, standard routing, denial of climbs or descents other then flight plans.

Now we have these spoilt brats playing Russian roulette with safety. I don't say that lightly. This BCN incident stinks of the usual game they are playing. I mean for goodness sake, we even had a Spanish controller on here last summer saying he denied an airliner a descent due to moderate/severe turbulence because he was unhappy! The phrase he used was roughly this "They were all calling for descents and climbs to avoid turbulence, but with me they will never climb. I am unhappy in my work"

Those of us who have to operate into MAD and BCN are painfully aware that those behind the screens are quite happy to use ourselves, our passengers and our aircraft to try and prove a point. They want something serious to happen, I am sure of it, so they can stand back and testiculate that the government is making the skies unsafe in a misguided and frankly astonishing attempt to get their previous salaries back.

You could never behave like that and that is why you and the others on this board who do not operate into and out of Spain will never understand.

I am all for workers rights and fair representation of workers but what you had here was a bunch of highly paid public servants who milked the system dry and when the country was facing financial ruin tried to hold it to ransom and continue to do so. For that they should, as has been said above, all be sacked. Reagan style.

[Bearcat]

HD,I'm very disappointed in your comments as a well respected veteran of the system. The above comments relay the real world outside the uk system.

What ATC did that nite put the EI crew under severe stress by closing their alternate knowing their fuel scenario..BCL ATC have a huge amount of searching questions to answer that will no doubt swept aside in the future enquiry. I as a pilot and long time Capt can not see why ATC would not afford Cat3 approaches if low VIS procedures all ready in effect re Cat2.

I never felt comfortable in my years going to BCL in inclement conditions.

A disturbing initial report to read, and I'm sure EIN are non plussed at the sequence of events.

[j636]

EI Fuel Emergency Barcelona - Not helped by Spanish ATC - boards.ie (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056605935)


Shocking on the Spanish ATC's behalf, but from experience I am not surprised in the least. They do not care about any aircraft in their airspace unless it's an Iberia or other local aircraft.
We were recently in Madrid's airspace at FL3xx enroute to the Canaries when we encountered Moderate turbulence that was very quickly worsening.
Reported to ATC and requested immediate descent to lower level. ATC's response was , we have not had any turbulence reported on your route!!! So we requested lower again. They asked us to standby and then asked an Iberia aircraft in the area were they experiencing any turbulence. The Iberia said NO, so ATC told us again there is no turbulence reported you must maintain your level.
By this stage we were in severe turbulence, couldn't maintain alt so descended with an emergency call, and they STILL argued with us.
They are the most unprofessional bunch of overpaid halfwits on the planet, and they are always on strike/work to rule!

[chevvron]

I happened to go to Barcelona a few days before this. (EZY8575; 8 Apr).
On short final for 25R (about 1nm I would guess) we did a missed approach; the Captain said ATC had spaced us too close to the preceding landing aircraft.(don't they have a 'land after' procedure in Spain?)
On departure on the 12th (EZY8574) I noted 25L was being used as departure runway and 25R for arrivals; we had to taxy from the east end of T2(near the GA terminal) all the way past the 25R localiser (ie behind it) to get to 25L. There was an aircraft on rollout on 25R as we crossed the end of the runway.

[Spitoon]

I mentioned this once before in another thread about the shenanigins of our Spanish colleagues but got no response or comments in reply.

It seems to me that we have a huge amount of European legislation aimed at achieving a common air traffic service across the region. Amongst other things, the Single European Sky regulations require services to be provided in a safe manner, there has to be a National Supervisory Authority to make sure that the rules are being followed and the European Commission and/or the European Aviation Safety Agency has some sort of responsibility to make sure that the States are ensuring that the NSAs are doing their jobs properly. And yet we have numerous reports - many of which seem to be fully substantiated as far as one can tell - and nothing seems to be happening on the part of all these regulators to deal with the 'problems' in Spain.

A dispute between employees and employer - as has been well documented here and elsewhere - is largely an internal national issue but there remains the question of who is taking any action to prevent the apparently common behaviour of many Spanish controllers affecting the safety of all those on board aircraft in their airspace.

Perhaps the Commission/EASA is working hard, but quietly in the background...but having little effect. Alternatively, all of the work, effort and expense that has gone into the Single European Sky for the past 10 years or so has been a sham, a complete waste of time and money and suggests that the assurance that we are supposed to gain by having expert regulators supervising the industry has no credibility whatsoever!

Does anyone know what the massed regulators of Europe are doing to deal with these problems? Or do they only like doing the bit where they write unnecessarily onerous and complicated rules....

[Zippy Monster]

we had to taxy from the east end of T2(near the GA terminal) all the way past the 25R localiser (ie behind it) to get to 25L. There was an aircraft on rollout on 25R as we crossed the end of the runway.

The comments about the landing on 8th don't surprise me in the slightest.

Re. 12th however, just so you understand what's going on (and I hope I don't come across as patronising here and telling you stuff you already know as an ex-ATCO, I gather from your profile you are a PPL who therefore may not have flown into BCN commerically)... this is actually normal operations at BCN, and not down to iffy controlling. The standard taxi route to 25L from the 'old' terminal (which easyJet and Ryanair use, among others) is parallel to 25R to the far end and proceeding via a taxiway called 'S14' to cross the centreline, before continuing back the other way parallel to 25R on the other side. S14 (and T14 adjacent to it) cross the undershoot of 07L/25R but do not actually cross the runway itself; therefore it is permissible to cross while an aircraft is landing or on the roll-out on 25R.

It's even worse when 07L is in use and you're crossing right underneath landing traffic a couple of hundred feet above you at the most - I ALWAYS brake and wait for the landing traffic to pass before crossing. All you need is a major bird strike on short final resulting in a LHR 777-type incident, and you could have a catastrophe of Tenerife proportions.

You very occasionally get a crossing of 25R much closer to the terminal if it's your lucky day and you get one of the few controllers at BCN who is actually good at their job and wants to help you out, but the standard response when you ask for this is "negative, too much traffic on the ILS" even when you can see and hear quite clearly there is nobody around for miles.

[Akhorahil]

Seems you still don´t know it, but here in Spain the controllers DO NOT DECIDE what rwy is used. We just follow orders from our chief supervisor or whoever gives that orders.

And stop complaining against the "flight plan route" routine. It´s legal, it´s recomended and is safer. We managed to reduce the 47 A class incidents of 2010, so it´s clearly safer.

I am not sure about BCN, but for you all to know, in LEMD on sundays we CAN NOT use both RWY 18 until 9:00. Something about noise. So, if the wind changes between 7 and 8 and RWY 33 is no longer used for APP you will have very high delays... of course you will blame the controllers for that (seems we pray for that wind change). Very easy to understand:
7am: RWY 33 in use, capacity for both RWYs 50/hour. So they take off... then wind changes and single RWY 18 is in use until 09:00 when the start arriving. Big delays, lots of holdings and we are the bad guys.

Again, controllers DO NOT DECIDE what rwy is used in Spain, maybe we did years before, but not now.

[manfred33]

So, being a US pilot, and please forgive my naiveté on this topic, but why on earth did the BCN controllers not allow EI to do a CAT III? Simply because they were not Iberia? I did not read anywhere about any equipment outages so, it is just mind-boggling that they would refuse to allow them to fly a CAT III...

[clonecity1]

Were other aircraft able to land CAT II 25R with that RVR? Why were Aer Lingus not able to?