If you a get a few you might get nominated by your manager and get a £50 Amazon voucher, personally I do not hand them in, some crew would kill for them, sad!

Within participating states (basically all of Europe, including Iceland) there is something known as IFPS, the Integrated Flight Plan Processing System. Any flight that routes in this airspace only needs to be sent to this one addressee, and IFPS will disseminate it to the appropriate ACCs.

So for the portion of an LHR-SIN flight that is inside the IFPS zone, that’s simple, but yes, for the portion outside the IFPS zone, it needs to be addressed to individual ACCs (or more accurately FIRs - Flight Information Regions, some FIRs might have more than one ACC within it, but the ANSP is responsible for ensuring the dissemination within FIRs).

I’m no expert, so imagine some areas/states might have similar arrangements to IFPS (Australia I think?), where one address is used for a flight plan processing system and that system then further cascades the flight plan out as appropriate.

After discussion with uncle T I am posting here

as some of you may or may not know, I hail from Australia, land of CTAFs, uncontrolled airspace and not that many control towers

currently in the Scottish islands and surprised to find places such as benbecula, barra etc have ATC Towers (haven’t made it to westray airport yet but I suspect they do not)

in australia I doubt any of these places would- smallest I can think of with a tower is Albury (possibly due to a large amount of flight school traffic), Ayers Rock is uncontrolled, places like Horn Island and certain fields on the Tiwis that can exceed 50 movements per hour (I believe) at peak times also uncontrolled

so the question is, what’s the deal? Does the UK have uncontrolled airspace/uncontrolled fields at all, or are the limits just different or...what’s going on?!

furthermore. If you are an ATCO in say Barra, are you expected to multi role? Or is it a part time job? (i’d imagine they’d need at least 2 controllers but obviously don’t know this, could be some kind of fly in arrangement maybe?). And if it’s a multi role thing, what on earth does an ATCO do the rest of their time?

so many questions for a confused Australian!

(also what’s all this about a bear obsession?!)

trying to think of an acronym for ATCO. Always tea/coffee on?!

Not sure about remote control in Oz, not that i’ve heard of although haven’t conducted an exhaustive survey 🤔

eta hmm apparently it was trialled in 2012 at my/our home airport (YBAS/ASP/Alice springs). Obviously went well as tower is fully staffed as before

The RAAF cause their own problems. Especially when the new hire ATCOs have to practice holding patterns 😉

Most interesting. I believe all airfields in Australia receiving jet service have to have some kind of professional aviation fire capability (when I worked on Groote Eylandt the mine had to shut down when the charters were due in as the fire trucks and ambulance had to head down to the airfield to provide cover)

haven’t paid close attention to YAYE but can’t imagine they wouldn’t have something similar in place also

the loss of separation incidents do continue to occur periodically though. I suspect a lot of that is the large number of general aviation planes operating into the smaller fields. The amount of traffic is just phenomenal (Horn island the largest thing that lands is a Q400, the tiwis would be king airs max. 50 movements an hour...)

That’s all fascinating, thanks Alpha!

it’s dictated by the airport. There are some local agreements to do with noise about which runways can be used I understand. It certainly isn’t just ba who use that runway, typically traffic coming in from the west from the Uk will use that runway if used for landing or take off from it if used for departures.

the only good point is when landing on 18R with the long taxi in, the departure is usually from runway 24 which is right next to the D gates which ba use.

As KARFA mentioned it is all planned by the airport and the general rule is if you come from the North and they are landing in a Southerly direction, you get the long taxi. Conversely if landing Northerly, you get the very short taxi. It all evens out in the end as mentioned with the departure. There is nothing to do with cost. With regards the reason for the end of concorse D, that is due to being non-Schengen and in the European Union. All the non-European arriving passengers are not allowed to mix with departures, and use a separate overhead arrivals channel. This area of D gates doesn’t have it, and is locally known as ‘little britain’ as it is where all the UK arrivals happen, as well as ROI and a few other non-schengen EU. EasyJet uses the low-cost pens, be careful what you wish for! The 767 used to get a special gate, as it doesn’t fit on the ones at the end.

Ah the infamous Polder runway. Closer to Haarlem than Amsterdam. It is a pain in the arse and frequently used when I fly in from London, but I also use KLM and they are equally susceptible. I doubt very much whether any one airline is more likely to be assigned it than any other airline.

I once had an announcement on a KLM flight from AMS back to Humberside that we would shortly be taxiing to Humberside airport, but we may have to hop across a short stretch of water in the process.

Regarding a few posts above, around the Highlands and Islands Loganair operate into airports with no air traffic service of any type but with fire cover appropriate to the aircraft. Quite fancy going up and doing a few of them sometime just for fun.

after my last week I will offer up the following advice. Build large amounts of padding into your schedules and prepare for many of the flights not to operate at all. I managed the take off from Barra beach runway but not a landing, and the Orkney inter-islander service didn’t happen at all. They were willing to rebook me to the next day but I just didn’t have the capacity for it, especially with HIAL ATC strikers shutting down Kirkwall airport the day after I left

There will be more news tomorrow.