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MEL Tower — Go Slow?
Melbourne tower folk... what is going on guys and gals? Spent 30 minutes at the holding point today watching 6 nm arrival spacings come and go with no departures and the usual efficient voices are operating half speed.
Technical or industrial? |
Must have been an ex military controller in the tower :yuk:
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Originally Posted by Bula
(Post 10128545)
Melbourne tower folk... what is going on guys and gals? Spent 30 minutes at the holding point today watching 6 nm arrival spacings come and go with no departures and the usual efficient voices are operating half speed.
Technical or industrial? Not just ATC either |
Multiple diversions from MEL including self a few mornings ago due to fog, unforecast might I add. RVR's hovering around 300-500 m yet TDZ 16, and nowhere else, suddenly drops to 50, below Cat 3B minimum. Just seemed a bit odd.
Any suspicion that their transmissiometer was dodgy? If so, could be an expensive claim from several domestic and international carriers. |
We were seeing 10-15 lights most of the time, but reported threshold RVR 300-350m.....??? It did drop to that from time to time, but didn't remain.
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Yep and last Sunday around 1730 local at the end of school holidays when things were really busy the ATIS showed wind 250/10 and RWY 16 only being used. Nothing in the NOTAMS showing 27 closed or the 27 ILS N/A... Flights being ground delayed due “single runway ops” WTF... |
That’s Australia! Maximum inconvenience for the maximum number of people. |
If they’re having a moment with ASA, I thought they would atleast be smart enough to know air service and landing fees still get paid. The only people they are inconveniencing are other people at work and costing tens of thousands of dollars in fuel in the process, again not ASA’s bottom line. There are better and smarter ways, rather than pissing off others in the industry who would otherwise support them. |
Maybe a single cloud appeared somewhere over St Kilda so, to be on the safe side, they dropped the rate. Just in case.....
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Nothing changed then! Remember many years ago often sitting at end of Mel runway for ages, in severe CAVOK in my 747. Waiting for clearance, landing aircraft a dot in the distance, in USA or Europe could have lined up and well away. “Clearance not approved”, was always the answer!! |
Obviously Airservices is wasting an enormous amount of cash employing all those controllers when we have such a highly skilled complement of pilots who could do the job without leaving their flight deck. Yes, I know that you do it at non-controlled aerodromes with lower traffic levels and lower capacity aircraft, but air traffic control is established for those situations when pilots can't safely and efficiently do it. My 80 hours of flight deck observation when training for ATC did not give me the idea that I could jump into a DC-9 and land it, nor did I feel competent to comment on how the FO was managing, yet you skygods know it all. You're as bad as - no, you're worse than engineers.
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Originally Posted by 40years
(Post 10131706)
Obviously Airservices is wasting an enormous amount of cash employing all those controllers when we have such a highly skilled complement of pilots who could do the job without leaving their flight deck. Yes, I know that you do it at non-controlled aerodromes with lower traffic levels and lower capacity aircraft, but air traffic control is established for those situations when pilots can't safely and efficiently do it. My 80 hours of flight deck observation when training for ATC did not give me the idea that I could jump into a DC-9 and land it, nor did I feel competent to comment on how the FO was managing, yet you skygods know it all. You're as bad as - no, you're worse than engineers.
You don’t need need to be able to lay an egg, in order to smell a bad one. |
A valid comparison, however, is comparing the amateurs in Australian ATC generally, and MEL in particular, with your vastly more competent colleagues in Europe and the USA.
Yes, if it is a knowledgable, valid comparison. Been there, done that. |
Nothing wrong with the controllers it's the ridiculous rules we have in this country. Apply Australian rules in the USA and aviation would grind to a halt. |
Originally Posted by neville_nobody
(Post 10131746)
Nothing wrong with the controllers it's the ridiculous rules we have in this country. Apply Australian rules in the USA and aviation would grind to a halt. However those in the ATCO food chain in Melbs need to work this to the top It's bad. |
40 years, from the tower you can judge a bad landing, from the ground we can judge poor sequencing or flow. We have seperate jobs but are all part of the broken system. it it just seems more broke than usual. |
There are days when the sequencing ex MEL can be simply awesome with very clever use of the crossing runways and associated rates of departure. Other days it's less so.Certainly multiple configuration changes over a 30-45 minute period (without an attendant significant change to prevailing conditions) can be frustrating.
I've often felt that one of the issues we have in Australia is that we have a fair bit of traffic but not quite enough. It's easy in LAX or LHR or elsewhere to set up a sequence where there is min distance between flights on approach. In Australia we don't have quite enough traffic. So instead of the arriving traffic being at 300' when the preceding gets airborne, they're at 1000' and we've wasted a lot of time waiting for them to get to the runway. Then again, our aircraft mix doesn't help. Places like LHR deal almost exclusively with jets with props making up a very small part of their sequence for both departure and arrivals. No doubt our sequences are harder to sort out with those sorts of speed differences. |
Pretty ironic that criticisms of inefficiency are coming from jet airline pilots. Perhaps we could expand this discussion to include issues on the other side of the ledger that lead to the perception of gaps being missed, or ATC on a go slow.Could it be that inefficiencies in the movement of aircraft at ML may be contributed to by pilots and their actions, such as repeated failure to make feeder fix times or exit hold patterns in timely manner; inability fly STAR speeds; complete ignoring of speed control instructions; inability to follow taxi instructions; unwillingness to readback instructions resulting in repeated calls; answering other aircraft’s callsigns; “was that for us?”; complete non-understanding of the instruction to expedite line-ups, and that it is not an instruction to square turn onto the runway then stop; unwillingness to actually execute an immediate departure after committing to do so; utter non-understanding of the rules of wake turbulence; the list goes on….If you have issues with standards by which ATC are REQUIRED to adhere to, take it up with CASA.If you think you can do a better job, come and have a go. I’ll loan you my headset.
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Yep nothing more frustrating to sit beside a Muppet that does the slowest lineup ever after being told to expedite (maybe even a mini 737 backtrack lel). Sorry.
And yeah, there's some out there that just refuse to fly the speeds allocated or be full flap at 12 mile. Sorry. I don't take it personally. The system is broken. |
Wow, deep breaths Exit Stage Left, deep breaths. As Bula says, if all these things are caused by pilots, why can we notice such a stark difference between when it’s running well and when it appears to come to a grinding halt? I have no doubt the odd pilot makes a mess for you every now and then (much less often than you would suggest), but that happens all over the world. It’s probably got less to do with individual pilots/controllers, and more to do with the fact that the wind can be 220/20 and we’re all flying min speed and holds because single runway ops. Ive even had 250/20 and they wouldn’t let us use Runway 27. And don’t even start me on the runway that doesn’t exist (09). Like I’ve said previously, I’ve arrive from the west to winds of 090/15 and runway 09 has been denied. The follow up phone call went along the lines of “no-one knows how to run Rwy09, so we don’t do it”. In 20 years of arrivals from the west, I’ve landed on it ONCE. The system is broken. |
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