Landing traffic not number one?
 

On a recent flight to LZKZ, arriving from the west, we early requested direct KE for a visual rwy 01 from the approach controller instead of being vectored for the ILS. Suddenly, the controller told us that there would be a departing traffic in 4-5 minutes, which was, even with speed duly reduced, our remaining time to touchdown. When asking, if we were number one, the answer was: negative, the departing traffic is number one.
Knowing that controllers in Eastern European countries are not too flexible, we requested vectors for the ILS after all to avoid ending up in a 360. Just one minute later, the departing traffic was already on the radio...
Isn't the landing traffic always number one (except maybe light aircraft VFR traffic being intructed to give way to IFR arrivals, which wasn't the case here)?

Cecco

Perhaps the departing aircraft was already on the runway?

We were on the approach frequency and the soon-to-depart traffic on the tower frequency so we didn't know. Just re-read the NOTAMs and saw that the parallel taxiway to the runway was closed. The departing traffic had to spend more time on the runway as usual that was why...hindsight is 20/20!

Can't vouch for other countries but in the uk your number in the arrival sequence is just that; it doesn't take account of departures, you might get "continue approach number 1 with one to depart" or similar but that's about it, and you are still considered number 1.

Maybe it was a case of language getting in the way.

There's the general priority that aircraft in the air has priority over one on the ground, and that one making a landing has priority over others in the air (from the Rules of the Air).

And as NQWhy says, in the UK (and the rest of Europe as far as I am aware) numbers like that refer to an aircraft number in a sequence of arrivals or departures. It sounds like the controller here was trying to indicate that there would be a departure ahead of you and, for the reason you discovered, this was a bit non-standard.

TWR ADB123 line-up
ADB123 lining up
ADB123 we need three minutes run up on the rwy...
TWR phones approach controller...

ADB123 in this case is an Antonov 124. I was surprised by this the first time I had one on the freq.
-------

TWR: XXX456 line-up
XXX456: lining up XXX456
XXX456: we have a small technical issue, should be solved in 2-3 minutes.
TWR phones APP
10 seconds later
XXX456, issue solved, we're good to go

These are only two scenarios. There are certainly many more but my guess is that there was already metal on the RWY

delay
 

Certainly it was bad phraseology that caused the problem...With a/c already on RWY, (making a backtrack) there are no many options what to do with arriving traffic, though. As a TWR controller all you can do is hope that dep. will start it's roll in reasonable time.

The question is whether controllers in LZ count dep a/c in sequence.

My question is - how do controllers in european countries put sequence numbers...do they ever say to No3 - "you're now No2, ....now you're No1,...", etc.?