@Jim_R I flew coast to coast and back a few years ago, wondering how much variety I'd really see in terms of ATC norms. I'd categorize airspace as either being busy, or not busy. Generally speaking, all the busy airspace I flew into was handled in much the same way across regions. All of the non-busy airspace was handled much the same way from place to place. Sometimes towers will have some local procedures, but they all fall into similar categories of instructions. The names change, but the spirit of the instructions remains the same. Do you feel differently?
The Alaska observation is interesting and sounds about right.
Perhaps "dramatically" was a bit...overdramatic. And as I mentioned, I don't have personal experience of all the things I think are different, so perhaps some of the impressions I have gathered are false. And maybe the differences I have personally experienced are just "meh" to most folks.
But I think that what you might get used to flying in a certain area could mislead you in what to expect flying elsewhere. Here are some of the things I'm thinking about:
- My home base is around "busy Class B" in the Houston area. But even though my home base is underneath overlapping Class B from two airports, it's not as busy as the Dallas airspace is. Differences in regions:
-- I'm always assigned a SID/STAR in both regions. However, I'm almost always on vectors within ~100 miles of my home airport, whereas I'm far more likely to be stuck on the SID/STAR in the Dallas area except when I'm under tower control.
-- In hundreds of flights around the Houston area, the only time I've ever been cleared through Houston B over Hobby was at 2am. Never been cleared over IAH at any time. I've been routed directly over DFW 4 of the 5 times I've had a route that made sense to do that.
-- Houston has an east-west VFR corridor to get GA planes between the Class B's of HOU and IAH. Maybe that's not completely unique, but there's nothing else like it within 500 miles. It's very familiar to locals, but I'd guess visitors from elsewhere who are used to flying around "their" Class B might be a little surprised when they come here and find that everyone gets shunted through this corridor when they're transiting the area. (I think there are local quirks / routines like that in many places that are familiar to the locals but maybe not intuitive to the visitor.)
Other things I had in mind when I made my earlier post:
- Austin approach (Class C) freqs are way more congested than Houston approach freqs, at least for the GA pilot. Intuitively, I expected the reverse. Guess the Bravo just gets a lot more resources to cover it.
- TEC routes are apparently pretty common/routine in congested California airspace. I never hear them discussed anywhere else. Maybe they exist in busy east coast areas, too, but I never hear anyone talk about them (and if they don't...why not? Isn't the DC-to-Boston corridor about as congested as the Santa Barbara-to-San Diego corridor?). TEC routes simply don't exist in my part of the world.
- For some of the airports that have CD / Ground / Tower freqs, it's not guaranteed that you always call CD for clearance. I've been handed to Ground for that before. Sometimes there's direction on the ATIS to do that, and sometimes you don't know until you try to do what you think is "standard" and someone tells you they do it differently, here. (I think I've also had a Ground controller tell me to call a CD freq (or maybe phone #) that wasn't in the AFD before, too.)
- Some Ground controllers will set you up with Flight Following prior to takeoff. Some say they can't, and tell you to request it from Departure once airborne. I've seen that from two nearby airports handled by the same Departure freq. I don't know what creates that difference.
- Spend a few hundred hours flying within 300 miles of Houston or along the Gulf coast, and you'll be surprised the first time you get close to some mountains, and you hear ATC tell you something like "we may lose comm with each other in the next few minutes. If so, switch to xxx.xx and try to raise so-and-so in 35 miles," or "you've flown beyond radar surveillance. Radar services terminated, change to advisory freq and maintain VFR."
Etc.
