babyboeing400, as most of the respondents seem to think that how it is done in the UK must surely be a world wide standard (and if not it jolly well should be!), I'd offer the advice of checking with the CAAS. As an ATCO who has worked in the UK and Australia I'd say it doesn't make a great deal of difference at my end of the mic - UK prefers it at the end and Aus at the beginning. As long as you say something vaguely coherent as well as your callsign you shouldn't go too far wrong;)

Sorry BEags, but I totally disagree, on several counts.

Firstly, what the fcuk does approaching mean? Three, Five, Ten, Fifteen, Twenty miles to run? And from which direction - N/W/S/E?

Now let's turn this around for a moment, with ATC giving Traffic Info, based on pilot reports, to other aircraft for example. Which would you, as a pilot, find more useful?:-

"G-CD, traffic is a PA28 currently approaching XXX ..........."

OR

"G-CD, traffic is a PA28 five (miles) south of XXX .......... "

Now I'm not too fussed about the five miles being hyper-accurate, but the 2nd example does give ATC, and other Airspace users, a far better picture.

Imagine a busy VFR sunny week-end. During the course of several hours, many dozens of light aircraft will make position reports. If they all include the totally meaningless "Currently Approaching", that can add up to a heck of a lot of wasted words.

Please guys, R/T time is a very precious commodity - Say Something Useful!

If it's a VFR flight at 90 kts, it'd mean not far from Little Piddle-on-the-Gusset, fairly obviously. Close enough for the purposes of the Flying Prevention Branch in any case.

I'm getting increasingly hacked off with all the ATC blah these days. On a nice day like today, I wouldn't talk to anyone unless I had to. All the "You must use LARS, squawk 7000C etc" NATS propaganda you can stuff.

"Squawking 7000, to en-route, good day!"

No problem with that, and I wish you a peaceful and enjoyable flight. But on those occasions when it is necessary to talk to ATC, it's just as easy to replace superflous generalisations with similarly brief specifics. It often negates the requirement for further R/T exchanges, and reduces the R/T garbage you quite rightly abhor.