Would anyone like to take me on a flight when Class D access is a problem? I have yet to see it.
I have once been refused – by Bristol. Common consensus seems to be that they operate their Class D as ‘closed’.
Never been refused otherwise. Gatwick in particular are extremely helpful. It further makes one suspect an attitude problem at Bristol because they cannot have anything like the volume of arrivals and departures that Gatwick have.
Solent (EGHI) have loads of times said “standby” (or similar) and then not got back to me, so I had to do a dogleg under the 2000ft CAS over the sea. Not a problem but you asked the Q 
This is usually flying west, but coming back the other way I was often told by Bournemouth that Solent is too busy for a handover. Mostly they are ok but some weird stuff goes on here and there.
I have not attempted transits of the London Area airports for years. I just fly around them. Southend, since it got CAS, has been ok with transits.
Obviously different people fly in different places and at different times.
On this topic, I can’t see how a pre-notification (no matter how implemented) is going to help, where there is too much other traffic in there, which should officially be the only reason for a transit refusal.
Timothy wrote:
Would anyone like to take me on a flight when Class D access is a problem? I have yet to see it.
No I haven’t had them either so far. There’s rumours of issues around Manchester making Liverpool the easier option, but I don’t go up there these days.
Peter wrote:
I can’t see how a pre-notification (no matter how implemented) is going to help,
Similar to booking-in/booking-out at aerodromes primarily for air traffic reasons, there’s a lot of “theories” as to whether controller resources (which there is a shortage of) can be allocated more effectively based on advance notification, even for VFR flights.
How this transpires into practice I have absolutely no idea.
Graham wrote:
I have once been refused – by Bristol. Common consensus seems to be that they operate their Class D as ‘closed’.
I have had no problem with Bristol, but haven’t tried recently.
Peter wrote:
Solent (EGHI) have loads of times said “standby” (or similar) and then not got back to me,
Solent is often raised as the bugbear (together with Stansted and Manchester) but I have never once had a problem.
Peter wrote:
On this topic, I can’t see how a pre-notification (no matter how implemented) is going to help, where there is too much other traffic in there, which should officially be the only reason for a transit refusal.
Allegledly, it was supposed to reduce the controller workload (as the request is processed before the aircraft arrives at the zone boundary), provide some awareness to the ATC and to reduce the length of the initial call (“request … as filed”).
Does it help in reality? No idea.
IMHO, at the root of this is “standard” UK PPL training which is
A slight exaggeration but you get the idea
Consequently a PPL gets very little (often zero) exposure to CAS before they get their PPL (it was exactly zero for me) and afterwards they have control over their exposure and most choose to avoid it totally because they don’t have the confidence. So they get very little practice on the radio. Every time you fly you hear dreadful examples of this, where i can only feel really sorry for the poor bastard who got such awful training… perhaps not helped by flying 6.01 hrs a year afterwards.
And the CAA cannot do anything about PPL training. They, and everybody else, knows this. They cannot even introduce GPS into it…
So we get cock and bull ideas like a website pre-notification… I can’t see anybody who can do the radio bothering with this crazy scheme.
On top of that, anybody will realise that the data entered is likely to go into a database to assist the location of infringers, on the relevant occassion or any other occassion. NATS certainly keep a database; on two occassions they emailed me immediately, while the CAA had to pretend they don’t know and they sent a letter to the N-reg trustee. So a lot of people aren’t going to use this…
arj1 wrote:
Allegledly, it was supposed to reduce the controller workload (as the request is processed before the aircraft arrives at the zone boundary), provide some awareness to the ATC and to reduce the length of the initial call (“request … as filed”).
Does it help in reality? No idea.
The stats (which I can’t lay my hands on) I saw presented by NATS on the topic suggested that:
that likelihood was rather high (> 90%), though of course that depends a bit on whether peoiple bother to ask.
How so?
If you go into CAS without asking, you get a transit allright but it goes to the infringements exam and the £200 hotel seminar 
