Well everybody ELSE can make a left turn, why can't you???

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Doug F

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I don't fly into airports with control towers. Is this normal?
 
It's normal to not let ATC dictate to you to do something you think is dangerous as PIC.
 
Bonchie said:
It's normal to not let ATC dictate to you to do something you think is dangerous as PIC.
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I was curious if the level of intensity (when I land I'll have my boss call your boss) was uncommon.
 
Doug F said:
I don't fly into airports with control towers. Is this normal?
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There are over 42,000 flights per day in the US assisted by ATC. This was unusual enough to be posted on YouTube and has received over 400k views. It's uncommon.
 
Doug F said:
Click the link. It's a recording of ATC and an aircraft that got a bit...intense.
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Sorry, I completely missed the link. I’m like you, I don’t have much experience with that, but I would think that’s not normal.
 
trenton said:
There are over 42,000 flights per day in the US assisted by ATC. This was unusual enough to be posted on YouTube and has received over 400k views. It's uncommon.
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Good to know. It certainly didn't fit my picture of comms at busy airports. I was also under the impression that the PIC is in control and if they say 'nope', then that's it...ATC needs to come up with something different.
 
Mike Smith said:
Sorry, I completely missed the link. I’m like you, I don’t have much experience with that, but I would think that’s not normal.
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Whew! After I replied, I had the horrible thought you were making a joke about my subject line and I had missed the joke...I've done that before...humor in text is hard!
 
No, I completely misunderstood. I gathered that you were the one that had had a bad experience.
 
I've heard crap like that a ton flying in and out of ATL. Everyone else flys thru an area of weather without any difficulties, but there is always one. Speed assignments, everyone flying the same speed for spacing but again there's always one. Once a pilot of an CRJ was assigned 180, and the controller wanted him at 160. Pilot asks "do you know what this jet stalls at!". One of the coolest controllers in ATL approach responds, "no, but your FO probably does". I think I laughed the rest of the way in to landing.

But, PIC have a say, so hard to fault the Aer Lingus Captain.
 
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It seems like the pilot refused one vector and the controller went out of his way to punish him, even though the pilot was doing his best to comply after refusing the initial turn. I get that NYC is busy, BTDT but this was ridiculous.

I recall only one negative experience with ATC and it never got even close to this. It happened to be valentines day and I assumed the controller may have been a little sour due to that.
 
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Shepherd said:
The pilot made a safety call.
Good, bad or indifferent, it was his call to make.
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This. And it should be noted that the controller had nowhere else to put him in that airspace.

Pilot accepted the clearance to the waypoint that everyone else in front of him and behind him was headed for, to enter oceanic airspace as his departure IFR clearance.

Pilot didn’t like what he saw on onboard radar, and said he wouldn’t go there. When he chose (just fine) not to fly that clearance, there’s no room in NYC airspace to do anything but spin him inside that controllers airspace until the controller can take the time to figure out a new plan for him.

Problem was, there was no place else to go. You hear the controller mention it to him in the video that he can’t have him any further north, or he’s in LGA airspace in that weather configuration.

After a few laps and seeing everyone else going to the waypoint, the pilot asked to be sent on to it, but the controller didn’t have a place in the conga line coming off that runway and heading that way. Everybody coming off of that runway was making the left turn.

The controller spun him around again (yes, maybe out of a bit of spite) because there’s really no room to do anything about it when NYC airports are all pushing. You stay in the line or you get spun. It’s the nature of an NYC push. With the BIG weather where it was, the only reasonable route out to the oceanic airspace was the way the controllers were sending everyone... where the little weather was.

When a gap opened up, he put the aircraft right back on the original assigned routing.

The traffic load in NYC is high and there’s three major airports and a bunch of smaller ones sharing a lot of airspace. Call it four in this particular case if you add oceanic Teteroboro departures in big private jets.

Pilot was ****y, he didn’t like how the weather that way looked, controller was ****y because every aircraft for the last hour and every aircraft afterward went that way. No great solution, but if you want out of the conga line in NYC, you’re going to be doing laps somewhere until they figure out what to do with you.

It’s the pilot’s call, safety first, all that... but NYC controllers are acutely aware of the weather and when they have to “flip” runways, they have to coordinate it between a WHOLE bunch of people.

That... was the reason I spent a very long night in a government baby puke green building installing conference call gear one very late night years ago. It was the touch screen driven system the controller supervisors used at all of the facilities to lunch up a conference call on the hoot and holler circuits and have a pow wow about when to flip the airports, amongst other things. Also where they communicated about emergencies, traffic flow problems, you name it.

They gave us 30 minutes to cut it over to new software, including back then, changing multiple EPROMs that stored custom messages and sounds. And it was loaded from floppy. That cut over was TIGHT, once we added mandatory smoke testing to the end of it before it went back into service.

Not ten minutes after we were done with that 1AM maintenance they needed that conference bridge for an inbound emergency to JFK. I was sitting there just hoping none of the new cards had any sort of audio or backplane problems, because the equipment back then didn’t have the greatest self-test capabilities of DSP to backplane communications.

How you found out one of those old systems had a problem was reports of static or dead air from one of the phone lines once the algorithm selected that card and DSP chip to handle that port. You had to fill it with calls and listen to every line manually to see that everything was truly working.

In the case of our FAA contract, we had to have them forego a full up test due to the 30 minute time constraint and accept an engineer sitting on site ready to disable any bad card or DSP manually that sounded wrong.

So there I sat. Until 4AM. Then someone in Denver took over for me at 2AM Mountain so I could go to the roach motel and sleep.

Went back the next day for another four hours or so, and everything was working, so we mostly chatted with the ops guy and managers about airplane stuff and then caught a plane home that evening.

Bottom line, NYC didn’t have any place else to put him, and he said he wouldn’t go into the weather. His call... he’s going to get spun until he decides to press on, or the controller has time to figure out what to do with him, in those conditions in NYC.
 
Doug F said:
Good to know. It certainly didn't fit my picture of comms at busy airports. I was also under the impression that the PIC is in control and if they say 'nope', then that's it...ATC needs to come up with something different.
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Yes. And they did.
 
dell30rb said:
It seems like the pilot refused one vector and the controller went out of his way to punish him, even though the pilot was doing his best to comply after refusing the initial turn. I get that NYC is busy, BTDT but this was ridiculous.

I recall only one negative experience with ATC and it never got even close to this. It happened to be valentines day and I assumed the controller may have been a little sour due to that.
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That is exactly it. Pilot didn’t like what he was seeing in real time and the controller decided to stick it to him and rub it in his face. Unprofessional.

That controller needs some downtime.
 
dell30rb said:
It seems like the pilot refused one vector and the controller went out of his way to punish him, even though the pilot was doing his best to comply after refusing the initial turn. I get that NYC is busy, BTDT but this was ridiculous.
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Penalty vectors are like lays potato chips; you’re never going to have just one....
 
I'm on the controller 's side on this one. You can't say unable and expect to get anything you want in congested air space and you will get what you get after you say no.

The exchange at the end was third grade stuff by both sides though.
 
Fearless Tower said:
That is exactly it. Pilot didn’t like what he was seeing in real time and the controller decided to stick it to him and rub it in his face. Unprofessional.

That controller needs some downtime.
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Not even close to that. Where would the controller have put him?

If you know the airspace well enough to claim the controller was vindictive, let us know where the next available oceanic clearance entry point is, that would have avoided the weather, and he could go direct to, without the controller needing to coordinate on the land line during a push.

NYC may be busy, but nobody I’ve ever talked to says they’re not fully aware of their weather and the airspace they have to work with, and try to keep aircraft out of the worst of the weather.

Pilot accepted the clearance. Pilot decided clearance wasn’t going to work for him. Controller spun him in circles in a little chunk of airspace he controls to keep him out of everyone else’s airspace out there, until he figured out what to do with him.

He wasn’t NICE about it, but he still didn’t have any other choice but to spin the guy. Nobody said controllers have to be nice. They have to keep airplanes from occupying the same space at the same time.

Very NYC... “I’ve got a job to do here... if you don’t want to play along, it’s vector in a circle time...”
 
I’m with ATC guy on this one, what the video doesn’t show is all the other traffic. And the “Im going to have my boss call your boss?” was childish.
 
Just because the last 5 people went through, doesn’t mean I have to go through too. I just have to be prepared for the consequences like getting spun around by NY.
 
I don’t fly in the system much and certainly don’t fly big iron. Maybe the pilot was being too cautious, doesn’t matter. Maybe the controller didn’t have anywhere to put him, doesn’t matter. What matters, as far as I’m concerned, is that the “busy” controller wasted more of his own time and radio time being an arsehole. You can be “right” and still be an azz.
 
Mike Smith said:
I don’t fly in the system much and certainly don’t fly big iron. Maybe the pilot was being too cautious, doesn’t matter. Maybe the controller didn’t have anywhere to put him, doesn’t matter. What matters, as far as I’m concerned, is that the “busy” controller wasted more of his own time and radio time being an arsehole. You can be “right” and still be an azz.
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What waste? He clearly wasn’t too busy to give vectors. He just had a limit of where he could put the pilot who accepted the original clearance and then the pilot decided he couldn’t do it.

That he wasn’t nice about it isn’t really relevant. It’s NYC. Better get used to it out there, even on the ground. If you’re in the way of “the system” you’ll get told so. It’s not personal to them. If you take it personally you’ll get a nice pat on the head after you get back in line.

Pilot’s safety call was fine. He just wasn’t going to get any other exit to oceanic airspace that day, since there wasn’t one. The controller knew more about that reality than the pilot who claimed to “have been to NY many times”.

Apparently not enough times to understand New Yorkers. Clueless, really.
 
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jordane93 said:
Just because the last 5 people went through, doesn’t mean I have to go through too. I just have to be prepared for the consequences like getting spun around by NY.
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IFR is a team sport, especially in NY.
 
Nate, if you don’t think that was punitive and excessive brow beating.......sorry, I don’t buy the whole “it’s NYC so I can be a Richard if I want to.”
 
Mike Smith said:
Nate, if you don’t think that was punitive and excessive brow beating.......sorry, I don’t buy the whole “it’s NYC so I can be a Richard if I want to.”
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I don't think it was excessive. He only spun him 3 times.
 
Shepherd said:
The pilot made a safety call.
Good, bad or indifferent, it was his call to make.
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‘Zackly. Just because the previous 5 aircraft made that turn doesn’t mean that it’s safe for the 6th. Weather moves and changes. Keep in mind that the radar on the FlightAware track is a static snapshot during the flight, so we can’t see what it looked like when this all started or how it progressed.

The controller started the bush league stuff when he started lecturing the guy on the air. Wasting the gas of a transatlantic flight to show who’s boss is irresponsible and unprofessional.

In the end, I’m embarrassed for both of them.
 
Posted this on another forum but I’ll put it here too


The controller should have just kept his mouth shut and done his job. It was a very professional "unable" from the AL crew. Sure, it added to the workload of the controller, but his job is to manage that workload. And sometimes there's something that doesn't go as planned. Anyone ever have that happen in the cockpit? Yeah, me too. And you deal with it as best you can at the time.

None of the other stuff matters. Doesn't matter if it's NYC airspace or middle of nowhere USA. It doesn't matter if a 152 flew through that cell 2 minutes before... if the PIC doesn't like it, that's his call. It also doesn't matter what the pilot saw or didn't see on the ground. He didn't like what he saw when he got up there and professionally informed ATC. And when the PIC asked to get out of the hold and asked for direct to the next fix, he did so calmly. The controller should have just said, "standby and let me work this out." Easy. The controller lost his cool and acted unprofessionally. If he's busy, that's his problem. It's busy in the cockpit too.

Damned if I’ll be intimidated by ATC and compromising safety because I don't want to **** someone off or i do what another plane just did because a controller said so.

But yeah, the “my dad will call your dad” at the end was silly. It wasn’t a penalty. It was a hold while he worked stuff out. He should have just kept his NY mouth shut.
 
I fly in NY center and actually into DCA with a waiver in an "all weather" aircraft.
I see too many pilots freak out when the radar (especially XM nexrad) is showing orange or red.
ATC will always allow slight deviation left or right for intense build ups.
Otherwise grow a pair, tell the pax to keep the belts on and move on.

The controller was right in this case, the 104 heavy was wrong.

Go to flightaware when there are some big storms and watch all the pros find the gaps.
 
Mike Smith said:
Nate, if you don’t think that was punitive and excessive brow beating.......sorry, I don’t buy the whole “it’s NYC so I can be a Richard if I want to.”
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Can’t see the other aircraft coming off the runway behind the Air Lingus doofus, but they’re there. Every whatever number of minutes they’re allowed to launch them, as fast as they can, Tower is going to keep sending them.

It’s browbeating but for a purpose. If he wasn’t a typically curt NY controller he might have said:

“I have nowhere else to put you now that you’ve decided you’re not going where everyone in front of you for an hour and three or four aircraft now behind you, have been going. There’s no other way for you to the Atlantic, so you let me know how long you want to do laps there or go land.”

No time for that crap in NY. Captain doesn’t want to go to the only gate to the Atlantic from that airport, fine... turn right heading... you’re going to be there a while.

Look at the traffic flow out of there sometime during a push on one of the radar websites. The controller wasn’t forcing anyone into the worst weather, he was using the only way out in the weather they had. Guy didn’t want to go. Fine, welcome to doing laps, I have no where else to send you.

You have to learn to speak New Yorker to understand what he’s saying there. He’s not going to make a long transmission to explain it to you.
 
denverpilot said:
Not even close to that. Where would the controller have put him?

If you know the airspace well enough to claim the controller was vindictive, let us know where the next available oceanic clearance entry point is, that would have avoided the weather, and he could go direct to, without the controller needing to coordinate on the land line during a push.

NYC may be busy, but nobody I’ve ever talked to says they’re not fully aware of their weather and the airspace they have to work with, and try to keep aircraft out of the worst of the weather.

Pilot accepted the clearance. Pilot decided clearance wasn’t going to work for him. Controller spun him in circles in a little chunk of airspace he controls to keep him out of everyone else’s airspace out there, until he figured out what to do with him.

He wasn’t NICE about it, but he still didn’t have any other choice but to spin the guy. Nobody said controllers have to be nice. They have to keep airplanes from occupying the same space at the same time.

Very NYC... “I’ve got a job to do here... if you don’t want to play along, it’s vector in a circle time...”
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The way the controller handled the original ‘unable’ was not professional at all. It went downhill from there. I’m referring to the incredulous ‘well, everyone else went through it’

But for some inside info, that controller is on his way out anyway. Already on an age waiver and likely to retire soon. He clearly has no fks to give.

And I do regularly fly that airspace for work. Like someone else posted, as PIC, if it doesn’t look safe to you, it’s your responsibility to do the Sully, regardless what ATC tries to push you to do. BUT, if you do that, you also have to be prepared to be vectored the long way around.
 
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Fearless Tower said:
The way the controller handled the original ‘unable’ was not professional at all. It went downhill from there. I’m referring to the incredulous ‘well, everyone else went through it’

But for some inside info, that controller is on his way out anyway. Already on an age waiver and likely to retire soon. He clearly has no fks to give.
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Yeah but he’s also got how many years of seeing that sort of weather? I’m sure he knows what it looks like when people start screaming that they’re bouncing FAs off of the ceiling.

We don’t know what Captain Lingus saw that made him nervous and neither did the controller, but Mo aircraft swapped paint, no one was harmed, and two Richard-heads had a nice little chat on the radio.

Not even worth worrying about other than the fuel the guy burned doing three laps. Modern airlines, that may have made the entire flight unprofitable. Haha.
 
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