Declaring an emergency (or not)

Velocity173 said:
One word I'm actually trying to flush is talley. A carry over from my military jargon.
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One way to flush it in a hurry is to come on over to Michigan and try using it with some of the civilian controllers here. In Selfridge airspace? No problem, they'll know what you mean. But at Flint, there is a good chance they will have NO idea what you are talking about and will ask you to repeat your last transmission. That gets old pretty fast. :wink2:
 
Military controllers in Afghanistan often assign an altitude change with "elevate to XXX." Not sure why, but it's very annoying, especially when referring to a descent.
 
Velocity173 said:
I like wilco also. I use it a lot. One word I'm actually trying to flush is talley. A carry over from my military jargon. Also not needed is no joy. As far pan, pan, pan? In 8 yrs of ATC I never once heard someone use it. It's simply "I'd like to declare an emergency."
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Many, perhaps most, of the times ROGER is used WILCO would actually be more appropriate.
 
The US is an ICAO member nation.
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Yes it is though much of what's done in the US is non-standard, and is slowly being brought into ICAO-compliance, where most of the rest of the world has long been.

Accordingly, one is more likely to hear Pan used internationally than domestically.
 
Sac Arrow said:
How do you guys feel about asking for a precautionary landing vs. declaring if it's iffy?

For example, I had my ailerons lock up on me in flight, and I asked for a precautionary landing on a non active runway I happened to be lined up with. I had rudder only steering. They gave it to me. I was ready to play the E card if I needed but to the extent they cleared me for the desired non active, I didn't see the value.

BTW I landed without incident and that was the end of it.
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I'd be declaring an emergency and asking for them roll the trucks immediately. I'd then land wherever the hell I pleased. If it was an airport without a fire department I'd be telling them to call whatever the hell the nearest fire/ems is and get them enroute.

There aren't many emergencies worse then your ailerons locked up and there is no reason to play any games to what degree of emergency you have. Escalate to the highest immediately and take all the help you can get. It takes some time to get the trucks to the runway and there is a damn good chance you could end up needing them.
 
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DouglasBader said:
Mayday and Pan are used to get attention on the radio.

We have a similar conundrum when using "minimum fuel" vs. stating an emergency. Minimum fuel conveys the message that an emergency may occur with undue delay, whereas stating that one has an emergency cuts right to the chase.

Pan is used to notify radio traffic that you need the frequency to broadcast your condition, and that you've got something that merits priority.

Mayday simply states that you've got an emergency and that you are the priority speaker. The floor is yours.

Both Pan and Mayday are used to creating an opening in the conversation. When the radio frequency is busy, calling Pan Pan Pan should immediately silence other traffic so that you can state your case. Mayday serves the same purpose; it's there to shut everyone up and give you the floor.
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Exactly. Pan is a signal that there is urgent traffic to pass, be it a weather issue, a request for non-emergency assistance, (in the CG we frequently used it to alert vessels in the vicinity of an active SAR case to inform them of the specifics of the vessel/aircraft in distress) or a heads up to an evolving issue pertaining to safety. (Say a buoy off station or a light extinguished) Mayday means "HOLY SH*T I need help!!!
 
BTW, on a side point...

A 'precautionary landing' implies to me that nothing is wrong but you have an indication that leads you to think that there possibly could be and out of an over abundance of caution you are going to land and check it out on the ground.

Jammed ailerons are not an indication that something 'might' go wrong. It's an indication that something 'has' gone wrong. In fact, jammed ailerons is one of the worst things that can go wrong. In my book it's better than the empanage falling off but worse than a complete loss of electrical power.
 
Henning said:
It's pronounced "pahn-pahn pahn-pahn pahn-pahn"
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That is indeed how the British pronounce it, but they do have their quirks (at least from our perspective) and we Yanks always pronounced it like frying pan -- which no controller from John O'Groats to Land's End or Wales to West Germany or Norway to Sicily ever had a problem understanding or complained about our "accent."

As for its use here, if you read the pubs, you'll see that "MAYDAY" is the right word for a "distress" condition, while "PAN" is the right word for an "urgency" condition, and that distress and urgency are subsets of emergency. We used "PAN" for things like loss of one of our two hydraulic systems (loss of both meant loss of control and ejection, so loss of one meant looking for a place to land toute de suite, as they say in France) and "MAYDAY" for things like a fire. If you just "declare an emergency," that does not tell the controller whether it's a distress or urgency condition, and only your description of the situation will tell the controller will identify which it is.
 
Threefingeredjack said:
Exactly. Pan is a signal that there is urgent traffic to pass, be it a weather issue, a request for non-emergency assistance,
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PAN signals an urgency condition, which is a subset of "emergency." Its use signifies an emergency situation, but only of the urgency variety, not the more immediately serious distress nature. See the Pilot/Controller Glossary for details.
 
Ron Levy said:
PAN signals an urgency condition, which is a subset of "emergency." Its use signifies an emergency situation, but only of the urgency variety, not the more immediately serious distress nature. See the Pilot/Controller Glossary for details.
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I agree, that definition is applicable strictly in the aviation arena, my bad. In a former life I spent nearly as much time on marine freqs while flying in an A/C as aviation freqs. The maritime usage is more broad. Senior moment.
 
Ron Levy said:
PAN signals an urgency condition, which is a subset of "emergency." Its use signifies an emergency situation, but only of the urgency variety, not the more immediately serious distress nature. See the Pilot/Controller Glossary for details.
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So is there a difference between asking for a precautionary landing and doing the pan pan?
 
DouglasBader said:
Yes it is though much of what's done in the US is non-standard, and is slowly being brought into ICAO-compliance, where most of the rest of the world has long been.
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The US is not the nation with the greatest number of deviations from ICAO standards.
 
Ron Levy said:
Yes, there is. PAN is a declaration of an emergency. Saying you're making a precautionary landing is not.
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I thought pan was the non emergency subset of emergency (mayday)?
 
roncachamp said:
That's from the DHS boneheads. During AirVenture many pilots file IFR to non-reservation airports with the intent to cancel near the filed destination and join the VFR arrivals to OSH. All of these diversions are supposed to be called in. After the first dozen or so they apparently got tired of answering the phone and decided no more calls were needed.
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ROFLMAO. May I be the first to thank you for rigidly following procedure and annoying the crap out of them?

:thumbsup:
 
Sac Arrow said:
I thought pan was the non emergency subset of emergency (mayday)?
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No, PAN-PAN (3 times) is for an urgency. It's still an emergency but for a distress you'd use MAYDAY.

As far as a precautionary landing you could use PAN-PAN to indicate you're an emergency but simply stating precautionary landing won't automatically mean emergency to the controller. It doesn't fall under declaring an emergency by their definition. It is considered an emergency landing by FAA flight handbook definitions though. Kinda confusing, but when in doubt simply state your declaring an emergency and that will simplify everything.
 
No, "Break" is used for creating a break in radio space, Pan Pan or Mayday are there to relay the level of urgency of a request.
 
azure said:
It depends on what you mean by "reasons not to declare". There may very well be repercussions and at least a preliminary investigation even for something as innocuous as telling ATC you have a fuel gauge malfunction and would like to land to check it out. You do not even have to declare an emergency to trigger the "repercussions". If you are in the system and divert for reasons that might be airworthiness or medically related, ATC is supposed to file paperwork and an FAA inspector will almost certainly come a-calling. If you declare an emergency for something airworthiness related or medical, even if you land at your filed destination, I would expect the feds to ask some questions. If it's possibly the result of poor ADM or airmanship on your part, ditto, though I don't have any personal experience so far with that kind of scenario (knocking on wood).

But the question is, if you or a passenger might need the fire trucks or medical assistance when you land, which is more important, ensuring the safety of everyone involved, or worrying about the suits and the paperwork? Skin, tin, ticket is the priority list I was taught. That said, if there is NO upside to informing ATC of what is going on, and no way they could help you either on the ground or before, I would not give them more information than they need to know. By definition, of course, if you have a true emergency, then you are likely to need help from someone as long as there is a chance that someone on board will survive.
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Wow, between all your MX problems, your IR checkride problems and reluctance to go pan-pan, are you sure you really should be flying? I don't say that to discourage you, but maybe you need to see someone that can reset your kharma, or something.
 
BurtM said:
Wow, between all your MX problems, your IR checkride problems and reluctance to go pan-pan, are you sure you really should be flying? I don't say that to discourage you, but maybe you need to see someone that can reset your kharma, or something.
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What are you talking about? If I had a control system failure, rough engine, gear stuck up, VFR into IMC, or anything that could really mean I might not be able to get on the ground safely, you can bet your bottom dollar I'd declare an emergency in a heartbeat and worry about the paperwork later. I just won't do it if there isn't a pressing reason and I've learned that it doesn't pay to give ATC more info than they need to know, especially when I don't need anything more from them than a frequency change.
 
azure said:
What are you talking about? If I had a control system failure, rough engine, gear stuck up, VFR into IMC, or anything that could really mean I might not be able to get on the ground safely, you can bet your bottom dollar I'd declare an emergency in a heartbeat and worry about the paperwork later. I just won't do it if there isn't a pressing reason and I've learned that it doesn't pay to give ATC more info than they need to know, especially when I don't need anything more from them than a frequency change.
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Ok. Good luck to you.
 
It depends on what you mean by "reasons not to declare". There may very well be repercussions and at least a preliminary investigation even for something as innocuous as telling ATC you have a fuel gauge malfunction and would like to land to check it out. You do not even have to declare an emergency to trigger the "repercussions". If you are in the system and divert for reasons that might be airworthiness or medically related, ATC is supposed to file paperwork and an FAA inspector will almost certainly come a-calling. If you declare an emergency for something airworthiness related or medical, even if you land at your filed destination, I would expect the feds to ask some questions. If it's possibly the result of poor ADM or airmanship on your part, ditto, though I don't have any personal experience so far with that kind of scenario (knocking on wood).
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There are no repercussions from having a fuel gauge malfunction. There may be if you've allowed yourself to run so low on fuel as to create an emergency, but even in that case you shouldn't hesitate to state your case and advise ATC of your intentions.

Whether you divert or not is irrelevant. A diversion does not trigger an investigation.

"Declaration" of an emergency doesn't do that, either.
 
...unless the FAA finds out you took off again without confirming that the "malfunctioning" gauge is working properly.
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Which goes back to my statement in post 52 that it's not illegal to have an emergency, but only to create one.
 
Outcome of the flight is in any doubt and ATC can help in any way, heck I'm not shy (as you all know). I can't think of a down side worse than getting crispy crittered.
 
DouglasBader said:
There are no repercussions from having a fuel gauge malfunction. There may be if you've allowed yourself to run so low on fuel as to create an emergency, but even in that case you shouldn't hesitate to state your case and advise ATC of your intentions.

Whether you divert or not is irrelevant. A diversion does not trigger an investigation.
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Incorrect. A diversion triggers paperwork. Paperwork triggers followup from an FAA inspector at least some of the time. Whether that's technically "an investigation", depends on your definition and on how things play out. In my case, it apparently stopped short of an investigation, but there was a phone call, and a line of questioning that was clearly intended to probe my PIC decisions prior to taking off again, not whether my actions led to a low fuel emergency.
 
All this diversion stuff triggering paperwork must be a post 9/11 thing because we never did it when I did ATC. If a pilot changed his destination it was simply a matter of throwing the strip to flight data and saying "Hey change this guy's destination to XYZ now." There was no investigation as to why they changed their destination and no report made to the FAA. Any current controllers out there validate this paperwork for a change of destination?
 
Velocity173 said:
All this diversion stuff triggering paperwork must be a post 9/11 thing because we never did it when I did ATC. If a pilot changed his destination it was simply a matter of throwing the strip to flight data and saying "Hey change this guy's destination to XYZ now." There was no investigation as to why they changed their destination and no report made to the FAA. Any current controllers out there validate this paperwork for a change of destination?
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It's a DHS requirement. No paperwork though, just a phone call.
 
roncachamp said:
It's a DHS requirement. No paperwork though, just a phone call.
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Yeah just got a text from my bro (controller). He said it was started about 3 yrs ago. They call it in and at his facility the sup logs it. Seems silly to me.
 
Velocity173 said:
Yeah just got a text from my bro (controller). He said it was started about 3 yrs ago. They call it in and at his facility the sup logs it. Seems silly to me.
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We don't even log it, sometimes we skip the call too. During AirVenture many pilots file IFR to non-reservation airports with the intent to cancel near the filed destination and join the VFR arrivals to OSH. All of these diversions are supposed to be called in. After the first dozen or so they apparently got tired of answering the phone and decided no more calls were needed.
 
roncachamp said:
We don't even log it, sometimes we skip the call too. During AirVenture many pilots file IFR to non-reservation airports with the intent to cancel near the filed destination and join the VFR arrivals to OSH. All of these diversions are supposed to be called in. After the first dozen or so they apparently got tired of answering the phone and decided no more calls were needed.
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I don't know if the comment I tried to make about that yesterday ever showed up from my phone...

Let me be the first to thank you for following their new procedures to the letter and annoying the bejeebus out of them with it. :)
 
denverpilot said:
I don't know if the comment I tried to make about that yesterday ever showed up from my phone...

Let me be the first to thank you for following their new procedures to the letter and annoying the bejeebus out of them with it. :)
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I don't merit your thanks. This call is my lowest priority, it tends to be skipped when I'm working alone. We did it during AirVenture, initially, because we had plenty of staffing.
 
roncachamp said:
I don't merit your thanks. This call is my lowest priority, it tends to be skipped when I'm working alone. We did it during AirVenture, initially, because we had plenty of staffing.
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Heh. Here's hoping you're so overstaffed in the future, that you can continue to annoy the hell out of the weenies who wanted this. :) :) :)
 
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