It isn't THAT bad here. Believe me, there are airports in the US which are FAR, FAR worse (not all, before you bite my head off). Not gonna be specific 'cos I don't wanna upset anyone.

enginerelight,
Are you really a BA pilot?.
Your comments make me doubt about it.

Gibraltar's nice, when you've crossed the border and can look back from 10 miles north !!!

On the beach :ok:

Well, that's your prerogative. I have flown both into and over Spain many times (although not into for a while now). It's a personal opinion but one shared, I assure you, by a great deal of my colleagues on Long Haul. There again, as I say, we only use the airways and even then only to go to Africa an ocasionally to GRU. The shorthaul boys may have another opinion; conversely, they don't fly to the US.

Talking to one of our trainers recently he said to me: There are those who don't know, and know that they don't know; those who know, but don't know that they know; and those who think that they know, but don't know that they don't know. And the most dangerous in this business is the latter.

In fact, I'll let you in on a little secret: we have an event monitoring system called sesma on all our aircraft. The highest frequency of events nearly always come from airports in the US: carrying excess speed, high on app, rushed app, and last but not least, the highest number of G/A's of anywhere on our network. True it is, we have a lot of flights there but even so.....

Not an aviator myself but a spanish ATC...that doesn't work in Spain.

Not that long ago I was Flying to NYC. Landing was a bit weird and when asking "how come we made a 90º turn seconds before landing?" I was told that was THE landing. I find it difficult to grasp that an airport such as JFK has a procedure as such to land...it seems more like tales of old times. But still happens nowadays in what should be some of the most advanced airspace in the world.

I can't recall the name of the approach but I believe it to be PAWLING 2. Anyways, you basically have to point the nose towards a RESIDENTIAL hill, and try an acquire visually a path formed by flashing lights. There's 2 paths, with different interval flashing lights each, for 2 different runways. When performed at night you also have to keep in mind that there are street lights and home's lights in between (don't get confused with those). And if you do all that right you're performing a 90º turn 1 mile from the threshold...scary enough if you ask me.

So, I can't say that the quality of ATC in Spain is better or worse than anywhere else but I can say that, from my limited experience with the American way of doing things, the yanks way does raise some eyebrows.

A.

Try a Canarsie in silly winds and 800ft cloud base. They only scrap it after the third go around.

I thought that WAS the canarsie approach that andrijander was describing?

ATC in Spain
 

Hello, fellows!

if you are considering coming to Spain to work as an ATC, give this thread a look:

http://www.pprune.org/atc-issues/404...ish-dream.html


Enjoy!