Gatwick ATIS
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: UK
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Why does an international airport tell me XYZ cloud cover at 20,000ft?
Thread Starter
Thanks for the replies.
For the record I have been on a TRUCE day at Swanwick, (brilliant, recommend it to any pilot), and have so far visited the control towers of Southampton, Heathrow, (the old one), Luton and Oxford. Gatwick is not my home base, so I don't have any spare time in the working day/night to visit ATC there.
I have the highest regard for UK controllers - you are the best in the world in my humble 'globe trotting' experience.
But please can we be vigilant against making things more laborious?. In recent years we have changed to "hectopascals" which takes longer to say than "millibars".
We now have
"runway in use two six left......ILS to be expected" instead of "runway two six left",
and the frankly ridiculous
"cleared to intercept the localiser. When established on the localiser, descend on the glide", instead of "cleared for the ILS",
and now at Gatwick we are wasting time with the redundant statement;
"delivery......on one two one decimal nine fife zero..... is closed. For clearance call Gatwick ground on one two one decimal eight" rather than just saying "for delivery call one two one decimal eight" (In fact we know what the frequencies are - they are all written on our airport plates - we just need to know which one to call)
I realise that most of these things are regulatory requirements, but who is coming up with them, and is any thought being given to RT traffic in busy airspace? By themselves each thing might be thought to be only a small increase in time taken, but all these increases add up to take too much time in our busier and busier airspace. We ought to be making things quicker and easier rather than more laboured.
I will email Gatwick ATC. Does anyone have a useful address for them that they could PM me?
For the record I have been on a TRUCE day at Swanwick, (brilliant, recommend it to any pilot), and have so far visited the control towers of Southampton, Heathrow, (the old one), Luton and Oxford. Gatwick is not my home base, so I don't have any spare time in the working day/night to visit ATC there.
I have the highest regard for UK controllers - you are the best in the world in my humble 'globe trotting' experience.
But please can we be vigilant against making things more laborious?. In recent years we have changed to "hectopascals" which takes longer to say than "millibars".
We now have
"runway in use two six left......ILS to be expected" instead of "runway two six left",
and the frankly ridiculous
"cleared to intercept the localiser. When established on the localiser, descend on the glide", instead of "cleared for the ILS",
and now at Gatwick we are wasting time with the redundant statement;
"delivery......on one two one decimal nine fife zero..... is closed. For clearance call Gatwick ground on one two one decimal eight" rather than just saying "for delivery call one two one decimal eight" (In fact we know what the frequencies are - they are all written on our airport plates - we just need to know which one to call)
I realise that most of these things are regulatory requirements, but who is coming up with them, and is any thought being given to RT traffic in busy airspace? By themselves each thing might be thought to be only a small increase in time taken, but all these increases add up to take too much time in our busier and busier airspace. We ought to be making things quicker and easier rather than more laboured.
I will email Gatwick ATC. Does anyone have a useful address for them that they could PM me?
Last edited by Uplinker; 4th Mar 2015 at 16:37.
