The Slaughter posted:

Yeah, but couldn't center be all, "I have an amendment to your route, advise ready to copy" on you?

Kawachi posted:

First things first, cold beer! Next move will be to get myself about 5 hours in a cessna 206/210 and try and get myself a charter job at the top end of the country. I'll come back to the IR stuff later down the track.

The Slaughter posted:

I didn't know that was an option, there's some pretty lovely reroutes around Chicago and Portland airspace I would have liked to avoid while on IFR plans.

Kawachi posted:

Been a long hard slog but I've finally managed to do it! I'm now a ASEL/AMEL Commercial NVFR!

The Slaughter posted:

Yeah, but couldn't center be all, "I have an amendment to your route, advise ready to copy" on you?

The Slaughter posted:

I didn't know that was an option, there's some pretty lovely reroutes around Chicago and Portland airspace

The Ferret King posted:

Sometimes it's an option, sometimes it's not. This time it was an option.

So I guess to fully answer your question, "what happens if ATC tries to reroute you, you ask to stay on the flight plan, and they reroute you anyway?" is:

"Well then the number 12 doesn't look entirely right when zoomed in."

The Ferret King posted:

I'd say that depends entirely on why the ATSAPs are being filed. Many use them quite frequently to report systemic issues because they can be the best way to affect change at a facility.

Also, there's a big difference between having a loss of required separation and letting a legitimately dangerous situation develop. A head-On collision course is a different level of severity than compression on final, which is different than a VFR losing 1.5 miles with an IFR in class Bravo airspace when they had each other in sight etc. Plus, if you're the type that never has any reason to file an ATSAP report during your whole career, because you never let planes get any closer than 10 miles from each other, that's another issue of deficiency that won't likely be addressed.

Maybe all this is stuff you already agree with, or not, but I just wanted to express that there are many levels of nuance when assessing the performance of an air traffic controller. I don't think it's enough to say "we need to be harder on people who make X number of mistakes" or to assume that because a person isn't reporting that many mistakes, that they're a good controller.

Another attitude I want to address, which wasn't implied in any of the above posts but I know it happens a lot, is the belief that a controller who is training is at fault for the conflict during a training session. A trainee is training because they don't yet have the skills necessary to do the job on their own, it's incumbent on the trainer plugged in with them to fix the conflicts in a timely manner and not turn pattern aircraft head-on into arriving jets.

The Slaughter posted:

Well, got LASIK this morning, so that's pretty cool. Better be 20/15 or 20/20 when I go for my follow up exam tomorrow. :/

Minclark posted:

So most of the atsaps around here are for aircraft to aircraft close calls.

quote:

Since atsap was introduced the number of violations (aircraft to aircraft) has gone up by almost double (in this facility). While I can't say for certain it is atsap I an only imagine that people here have taken it for a license to suck at their job.

quote:

Asfar as separating by 10 miles I a required to have 5

The Ferret King posted:

That's interesting. Comparitively more than reports for losses of separation that weren't close calls?

The Ferret King posted:

I don't think fear of reprisal is as big of a motivator in this job as some of my coworkers believe. I think our poor controllers were poor before AND after ATSAP.

bunnyofdoom posted:

Question: How long will I have to endure friends and coworkers who are not pilots making some sort of "Danger Zone" joke at me? (I do not work at a spy agency btw if that affects calculations)

bunnyofdoom posted:

Question: How long will I have to endure friends and coworkers who are not pilots making some sort of "Danger Zone" joke at me? (I do not work at a spy agency btw if that affects calculations)

bunnyofdoom posted:

Oh I do. Don't get me wrong, I was the first to make them, but 5 months later, I stopped doing it. They haven't.

(That being said, anytime I feel bad about my approaches, I watch the scene with Cougar. Even after I almost killed me and my instructor this morning. Wasn't a good morning)

e.pilot posted:

bunnyofdoom posted:

....yeah. Was a really bad approach. Not my best flying day. Fortunately, my trainer is not named Lana.

e.pilot posted:

Don't feel too bad, I'm still amazed I passed my private practical. By far some of the worst flying I've ever done was with my DPE.

brendanwor posted:

Congrats! Although the idea of flying around NT in the wet season without an IR scares the gently caress out of me. Good luck with the hunt!

The Slaughter posted:

you want to fly a 206 eh? welcome to my lovely airplane.

Minclark posted:

I think it was September the center had enough deals to cover the entire year prior.

Minclark posted:

I think atsap is letting poor controllers off the hook and reducing peoples desire to get better at the job.

The Ferret King posted:

That didn't really answer my question. I'm guessing every deal at your center is a close call then?

The Ferret King posted:

But why? They were already bad and not fired. I don't think any of my coworkers in their 40s have any intentions of changing their ways before retirement, with or without ATSAP (I don't even think most of them actually use ATSAP since they're suspicious of it).

Minclark posted:

If it wasn't close would it be a deal? How close do aicraft have to get before you decide it is a close call?

The Ferret King posted:

I was looking for something more concrete from you to prove your point.

The Slaughter posted:

I would say the same to you. Try power for altitude and pitch for airspeed while on final in a Jet. That's the reason we teach pitch for altitude and power for airspeed. It also goes back to instrument training - when you're 1 dot low on an ILS, are you going to increase power? No, you're going to change your pitch.

Are we really going to hash out this forever-argued thing in the thread? Really. For GA people your way is fine, for anybody with future commercial ambitions, they should be following my way, because primacy. Also, the two big disclaimers are "this assumes power is a variable" and "there is a relationship between pitch, power, altitude, and airspeed and you're basically doing the same thing regardless of how you think about it". So.. don't do it backwards.

KodiakRS posted:

I think the best technique is to understand that power/speed/pitch/aoa/altitude are all related and that adjusting one will affect the others and you should coordinate their use to achieve a stabilized approach.

Minclark posted:

I can try and get numbers of incidents and point to where atsap was introduced but I won't be able to get exact distances of each incident. Also last year the snitch went regional so the facility doesn't track it anymore making it difficult to track an exact number.

Ofcourse datamining is exactly that and extrapolating information from that data is left up to each person viewing it. Would showing you an increasing amount of deals and increasing amount of atsap reports be enough? I'm not exactly sure how much information I have to send to convince you but its enough for me. I should have the numbers here in a few days pending managments aproval to release them.

The Ferret King posted:

I was looking for something more concrete from you to prove your point.

The Ferret King posted:

I don't care so much, I don't think you see my point anyway.

Minclark posted:

The younger generation (after whitebook and atsap era) have never known what its like to sit on position and know the possibility of it being your last day or the last day of the person next to you is a possible outcome

vessbot posted:

I do it that way regularly in a "Jet," and it works beautifully since it's in accordance with the laws of aerodynamics so I'm not sure what bad effect you threaten should befall me. And if I'm low on any approach, of course I'd increase power -- how else would I expect the airplane to shallow my approach or climb? Am I simultaneously tossing suitcases out the side or something? Is this a trick question/answer?

Apparently this forever-argued thing is worth hashing out again. I'll start with the end of your post, which I'm genuinely confused by. You note that the physical result would be the same regardless of the thought process behind it, but in the same sentence you reaffirm that your way is right and we should follow it. If it's all the same, what gives? Why not use either?

I'll answer why not, and why you should teach "pitch for airspeed."

The first reason touches on a very valid concern of yours, primacy. Our entire lives our brains have been getting wired up by the concept that wherever you point your nose, that's which way the vehicle goes (cars, bodies, movie depictions of airplanes, etc.) and, even worse, once we become pilots, 99% of the time the airplane behaves like that too, at least for the first few seconds. So for the majority of pilots, "what to do in or near a stall" falls by the wayside as an academic exercise, far removed from the everyday responses that become ingrained as second nature.

So, it's no surprise at all that when it counts most, in an unusual or panic situation, that people will revert to that mode of thinking reflex, and we get things like Buffalo, Air France 447, and countless students that try to simply lift the nose when coming in low. When staring wide-eyed at rising ground or an unwinding altimeter, is the most hopeless situation in which to expect someone to uproot everything their hands remember to do from bad reinforcement over X thousand flight hours, and immediately switch around their understanding of how the airpalne behaves.

Therefore, to use primacy toward the effect of good flying technique, we need to teach in accordance with the laws of flight dynamics, and have students really really understand and internalize them from the very beginning. And what are those laws?

For any steady-state flight condition, 1) Airspeed is determined solely by angle of attack, and 2) Climb/descent angle is determined solely by excess thrust. These rules are hard, indisputable, and always hold true regardless of what mental trick the pilot uses to remember to move which hand where, or the physical outcome of the airplane. Having someone understand at a gut level that when they're in dire need of airspeed, the only way to get it is a reduction in AOA, and that everything else is just icing on the cake, is how to most effectively arm someone to handle a crappy situation.

And it seems self-evident to me that the best way to teach how to fly an airplane would be, well, the way that an airplane flies. As a result of that, it's no surprise that the flying organization that has the most at stake in ultimate precision control, the US Navy, teaches pitch for airspeed and power for descent angle.

So, don't do it backwards


This type of thing is a side annoyance of mine. I mean I guess it's a good way of politely closing the topic after an unsettled pitch vs. power debate and moving on to having a beer or whatever; but as a "technique" it meaningfully says nothing. I agree that everything is interrelated, but then what? Which thing do I want to adjust, when, and for what purpose? Which other thing will it affect, and how? How do I coordinate their use to achieve a stabilized approach? Armed with this information, in the airplane with stick and throttle in hand, what am I to do any differently than I have been already?

fknlo posted:

I hear this, but I also then hear stories of fairly constant deals back in the days of higher traffic and 2000ft separation and whatnot. Which was it? I think 90% of the poo poo I hear is "Things were so much harder back in my day when I had to walk uphill to work in the snow!" kind of stuff.

Tommy 2.0 posted:

Man you crack me up.

Captain Apollo posted:

Gave some dual in a Bellanca SuperViking today. Neat airplanes.

Wondering if they are mainly a West Texas thing or if anybody else has ever flown them.

Captain Apollo posted:

Gave some dual in a Bellanca SuperViking today. Neat airplanes.

Wondering if they are mainly a West Texas thing or if anybody else has ever flown them.