ATC Weekend

Hi folks!

Its been a slow weekend, but Saturday had a number of people flying in so that was cool. I have been experimenting with some routing techniques and I think I'm making some good improvements. One main area I know I need to improve on is my radio technique, this has been pointed out a few times. So I'm working on this too.

I'm going to be looking at getting some buildings in the airport over the next couple of weeks. It looks like the floating terminals and their gates. I think the main terminal building will be trickier but I'm going to do my best. If anyone knows about this stuff and would like to help out then I really could do with it, it looks like I am going to have to build some of my own models and frankly there is only so much room in my head for so much.

What I'm planning

I am working on figuring out the ICAO.procedures file format so I can offer SID/STAR files for your autopilot. The wiki on this is pretty poor, there is no definition information and pretty much 2 whole pages and the only useful information on them is the location of the files ... go figure.

Once I have worked this out I will probably publish what I learned on here so its not so hard for other people in the future. I have yet to look at the XML layout of the models, I'm hoping I can load these into the blender or some other VR tool I have experience with (I used to be a Virtual Reality content creator and community host).

Hello there!

I had a visitor from someone who said they are a reader, but at that moment everything was getting crazy on mumble (see troll rating below) so I'm sorry I didn't see your chat after you were parked up; it gets crazy sometimes.
But hello to "Goose" and I'm glad you came to visit. I hope you pop in again and have a chat.
 

A few flights

 I had a few nice flights, some regulars came through and so many fighter aircraft this weekend. the F-14 seems to be getting very popular. I have had a brief read up on the military phraseology a little, I do forget bits here and there though.

If you are one of these pilots and you want to fly as a group thats great, but please elect one of your group as the formation leader beforehand, it makes things so much simpler. And just because you are in a fighter jet does not mean you get priority over other traffic, Stansted is a commercial airport and commercial aircraft will get priority.

That being said; I do enjoy it when its not at "peak" times where there are lots of liners inbound, this is a bad time to to pattern flying.

Troll

The troll was a bit more active this week, at one point they were directly targeting me, but they didn't have the staying power for someone thinks having your own troll is like a trophy.  He was mildly irritating  but not really very fun this time. His act had no thought put into it like the other guy and he was obviously pandering to the audience (I could manipulate him to change his name). The most sophisticated they could come up with was joinquit and setting their recording device as the audio monitor.

Troll rating: 2/10 - A poor effort all round.

ATC Evening, a nice flight and ATCPie

Hi everyone,

I hope you all recovered from my last post! crazy eh!


I did a short flight from EGSS to EIDW which is one of my favorite routes. This time I flew the SID called BUZAD 4S which seemed to make sense at the time, and hell Luton wasn't online at the time so I didn't feel too bad about violating their airspace.

As you can see I have been fiddling with the atmospheric settings so I can have 3D clouds and better scattering, but if I have too much on I get software crashes often. The left image has that weird bar on it, it has something to do with my screen capture process. For some reason it also makes things move about, if I have OpenRadar open then it will cause the view to shift south-west by 40 miles.

 


The weekend was fairly routine ATC event, here are some shots of Sunday night. I have been trying to work on my queuing technique lately and on this occasion it seemed to work quite well.  I had a good rate of attendance too, which is great! I love visitors!

 

Thanks to T-URBO for standing in for me for an hour on Sunday night, I had to dash from the computer and he ran the tower for me, and what would you know, it got busy right at that moment. When I got back I did a bit of ground control whilst he cleared his queue. It was pretty interesting to see someone else run the tower.

ATCPie

I have been experimenting with ATCPie, the work-flow is very different but it has so many cool and useful features that I keep going back to look at it. My main issue now is FP handling, the work-flow is very different to what I am used to I just need to get a handle on the best way to be efficient and not keep people waiting. I have yet had the option to push to the flight-plan exchange server working, but that should be a neat feature.

I like all the additional windows and the fact you can undock anything and have it on another monitor, I REALLY like that.

Troll

The troll was much better this time. He logged in as the name of a country and then played awful music from that country, then when they would leave and rejoin as a new country and go again. He did about 8 different countries all with their own music lined up, the guy actually researched it beforehand!
Troll rating 5/10 = Somewhat irritating (Including 2 bonus point for creativity)

Stansted Airport Visit

Hi folks,
Its ATCJay here again with another post. If you have been reading regularly then you will know that I alluded to something cool in my last post, well today it shall be revealed!


Do you know where this could be?

That's right, its Stansted Control Tower, the bloody real one!

I wrote an email to someone at EGSS asking for a picture or two and a couple of questions, 'great' I thought, if I'm really lucky they might reply ... so as you might expect I almost caused a major trouser incident when they emailed me back inviting me to the tower. And as you might guess, being England, it pissed it down raining!


I don't know why, but for some reason I thought that the tower would be pretty much an empty tube with the cab at the top, nope its rooms and stuff all the way up, who would have thought it.

I'll go into some of the questions I asked and things we spoke about but so much was spoke about I doubt I could capture how cool it was. I was surprised that there were only 3-4 people in there, they were all friendly but very busy. I was a bit nervous about talking to one of them when he said hi because he still had his headphones on and .. well if I get distracted all that happens is someone flies through someone else or someone gets cross at me for making them wait.

I had some issues with the camera deleting files, rather not giving me an option not to delete them, so not all of the pictures I wanted made it onto the card but some of them are here (and should be click-able to enlarge)

I asked about how things are routed there, The routes are mainly used for radio-out situations and they use direct vectoring for approaches. And the SIDs are incorporated into the flight plan which is done during filing process so it sounds like they don't really have to deal with that.

I would have LOVED to get some pictures of their equipment but this wasn't possible. I'm not actually sure how detailed I can be in describing it. But to be honest the in-tower hardware that you could see was mainly just some very nice looking flat screens and an stunning view out of the window.

They did have some nice tech for strip management which looks very similar to the strip management software for Vatsim, but a lot more hands on. The actual hardware would probably be in a rack somewhere, I'm not interested in that I've seen servers before.

They had a training room which was the last place I looked at in the tower, unfortunately this was all powered down, but wow what a set-up! There were screens as big as TVs to mock up the window view and a series of monitors arranged in a manner to replicate the tower position so the training reinforces muscle memory. These guys are smart!


I have realised how spoiled we are with OpenRadar's radar display, they do not have all the SIDs and STARs on theirs.

It was really cool to see take-off from the actual tower, no ORCam required! There was a couple of other events I would have liked to photograph but I was too interested in speaking to the guy that we were just watching everything go down. Someone let off a fire extinguisher on Alpha West, but I didn't see any flames and it looked like nothing was damaged and no one was hurt.

Watching an arrival that was due to park at the business centre miss taxiway Golf because he was going pretty fast, was something that felt very familiar.

 
This picture is my favourite, I know you probably think that's weird but on my evenings on FlightGear this is where all the action happens. When someone parks its usually here, at Alpha East. I was looking down at this and thinking "Oh yeah, there’s SkyBoat and KL-666 down there waiting for my slow ass to give taxi clearance"


I like would like to give a big thank you to everyone at Stansted Tower for letting me come and visit and putting up with me endless questions. you guys are really cool and do a great job!

About emergencies

Hi,
I thought I would post about something that we all encounter on flight simulators; People declaring an emergency in order to jump the queue.

I don't mind emergency procedure practice but I would appreciate some advanced warning that you are going to practice. The issue arises around multiple people doing it at once, it creates a very unrealistic scenario which is less fun for everyone and increases the ATS workload significantly. If done properly we could turn it into something fun we can do.

I have heard a few versions of procedures for running low on fuel and everyone seems to just do what they think is right, myself included, so I thought the best thing to do is check what the CAA have to say on the subject.

Perhaps we can come to some procedure that applies more closely to FlightGear so people can practice these things at the same time add a little more realism for everyone.

So in order to see how the CAA handle these situations here is an extract;
Source; CAA Manual of Air Traffic Services - Part 1 (CAP413 ed5)
Section1: chapter 4 (Control of Traffic) pages 6 and 7.

10. Flight Priorities

10.1 Normally requests for clearances shall be dealt with in the order in which they are received and issued according to the traffic situation. However, certain flights are given priority over others and the following table shows the categorisation.

10.1 When two or more flights of different categories request clearance the flight with the highest category shall be dealt with first. Flow control procedures are implemented and actioned by the Central Flow Management Unit. A flow control priority will be allocated automatically on receipt of a flight plan.

10A. Minimum Fuel and Fuel Shortage 

 10A.1 Once in possession of the estimated delay for an approach a pilot will determine whether or not he can continue to the aerodrome or divert to a suitable alternative aerodrome.

10A.2 A pilot's declaration of "MINIMUM FUEL" indicates that no further fuel diversion options are available where the aircraft is committed to land at the pilot’s nominated aerodrome of landing with not less than 'final reserve fuel'. However, “MINIMUM FUEL” RTF phraseology is not universally used by every aircraft operator and pilot.

Note: Final reserve fuel is typically fuel for 30 minutes of flight for turbine powered aircraft or 45 minutes for piston powered aircraft. (EASA-OPS)
10A.3 Controllers are not required to provide priority to pilots of aircraft that have declared "MINIMUM FUEL" or that have indicated that they are becoming short of fuel.

10A.4 Controllers shall respond to a pilot's declaration of “MINIMUM FUEL” by confirming the estimated delay he can expect to receive expressed in minutes if the pilot is en-route to, is joining, or is established in an airborne hold; or by expressing the remaining track mileage from touchdown if the aircraft is being vectored to an approach.

10A.5 Once in possession of either the estimated delay or remaining track mileage, the pilot will determine whether or not he can continue to the aerodrome with or without declaring a fuel emergency. Controllers shall keep pilots informed of any increase in delay or increase in track mileage after the pilot's initial declaration of "MINIMUM FUEL" following which the controller can expect the pilot to declare an emergency.

10A.6 Controllers shall respond to a pilot who has indicated that he is becoming short of fuel but has not declared "MINIMUM FUEL", by confirming the estimated delay he can expect to receive expressed in minutes if the pilot is en-route to, is joining, or is established in an airborne hold; or by expressing the remaining track mileage from touchdown if the aircraft is being vectored to an approach; then ask the pilot if he wishes to declare an emergency.

10A.7 Pilots declaring an emergency should use the following RTF phraseology "MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY" or “MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY FUEL” and controllers shall provide such aircraft with flight priority category A (ICAO Annex 6).

10B. Medical Emergencies

10B.1 Pilots who allude to medical emergencies on-board, e.g. a sick passenger, but who do not formally declare an emergency or indicate that the person on board is seriously ill, shall be asked to confirm that they are declaring an emergency. In the absence of such a declaration, controllers are not required to give priority to the flight.

10C. Flight Priority Categories

10C.1 Controllers shall give priority to aircraft according to flight priority category listed below, where category A is the highest priority and Z is the lowest priority.

:END

What do you think?