I cannot imagine Newcastle had a single good reason for denying your clearance request.
Cases such as this should be subject to formal and independent investigation.
If there are commercial arrivals/departures on a deconfliction service, or no radar, or controller workload, or relevant NOTAMS-all these might be relevant. ATC may not be joined up in the UK, but there isn’t a conspiracy.
Perhaps I should have asked for a little more information from the O/P in terms of his timing of, and initial conversation with, Newcastle.
However, the implication was Newcastle knew well in advance he was coming, and in flight and a conversation had taken place as to required intentions – hence regardless of commercial arrivals and/or departures etc it seems to me the controller had a duty to organise himself and other traffic in order to enable him to give the service or, at the very least, offer something helpful like take up an orbit for x minutes, expect onward clearance in y minutes. The pilot then has the option to take up the orbit and wait, or to make another plan.
The trouble is these failures are all too easy to ignore – what is needed is an independent investigation of each, so it can be established whether there were any reasonable grounds for the complete denial, and why the alternative of taking up an orbit outside CAS was not offered.
If it is the case that the workload is so high and will last so long that a few orbits would not solve the problem then the controller should at least state this to be the case as it clearly indicates the staffing arrangements are inadequate, and this in itself, should be grounds for investigation, as it would suggest there are periods when clearly a clearance will never be given, in which case, again, at the very least, this should be NOTAM’ed.
To close this, but not the Durham one, I have just received from the Newcastle watch manager a very thorough, helpful and open response. It is not appropriate to reproduce it on a public forum but suffice to say that it identifies the learning for me that we have already developed here and in another place plus identifies a learning point for the unit.
