+1 for mandatory handling. Usually a total rip off.
ATIS. What a joke – stenographing for a couple of minutes, sorting through irrelevant stuff (“hazardous weather is available on hiwas…”) while juggling ATC on a separate freq in a busy terminal area. Sometimes the ATIS signal is too weak to pick up before getting onto the STAR, increasing the workload during a critical phase.
The relevant information could be texted & interpreted in 5 secs if only we had D-ATIS in GA.
In fact, the whole IFR regime is completely outdated. Navigating on airways. ATC via voice on VHF. Typing obscure clearances into your GPS.
We should all just fly direct, letting ADS-B sort out the separation. Terrain handled via the sector MEA’s in the nav database. Sequencing into the terminal area could be handled by an approach computer. Restricted areas & ATC overrides communicated realtime into the cockpit.
I always thought this one was quite amusing:
Airport closing hours and not being allowed to fly on that gorgeous summer evening.
When a private meeting somewhere shuts down flying for four days.. That’s my new pet hate.
It will be cloudy and foggy up there anyway. If it were just for the flying, I would definitely head south in this kind of season. Tuscany for example. Ideas here.
All the preflight paperwork. I didn’t learn to fly to fill in forms:
I seem to spend more time on pointless paperwork than actual route planning on most trips.
Also absurdly short opening hours – too many great airports only open during bankers hours during the week and even shorter hours on the weekend, and have absurd and costly procedures if you want to use the airfield out of hours.
Jacko wrote:
Attention-seeking twits who dial 999 to report a “crash” when they see a Maule landing off-airport. It’s deeply unflattering.
We did a couple of field trips to Aboyne Gliding Club. One of our members landed out (embarrassingly close to the airfield) and someone who must have been a newcomer to the area (she had a horsey accent from the south of England I think) called the police and reported a plane crash. The thing is where our guy landed out, the general area is used for outlandings all the time, sometimes you get rotor right over the airfield and everyone is instructed to land out (and IIRC there is an agreement with a local farmer to use some of the pasture land for this) and it basically rains gliders.
The police officers arrived, waded through a waist deep stream as they didn’t know the field had a perfectly good road leading to it, saw it was just a glider outlanding, breathalyzed the pilot but stuck around to help us load the glider into the trailer – which was a bonus!
My pet hates are lack of out of hours arrangements and the fact that airports are generally in the middle of nowhere with no transport options.
The lack of “out of hours” arrangements has always bugged me. In the winter it doesn’t matter too much, but during the summer it’s often put an end to my plans. Often airports close at 6pm when it’s still daylight until nearly 2300. No problem if they are happy for you to arrive and depart out of hours (after requesting suitable permission and giving whatever details/indemnities/copies of insurance that they want). But why do so many not allow you to arrive/depart under any circumstance?!
On number of occasions I’ve been stuck unable to depart due to bad weather. Then as the sun starts to get a little lower in the sky (still plenty of daylight) the sky starts to clear up. It’s a common weather pattern, which seems to happy just after the airport closes! This one has caught me out too often over the year.
The middle of nowhere problem is an ongoing one. You can land somewhere but to get to the nearest town (or even somewhere decent for lunch) involves an expensive taxi, which is only available after a long wait.
I’ve tried to sovle this with foldup bikes, but not satisfactorily. I had hopes that a “hoverboard” might be useful, but they all seem to go on fire according to the internet!
alioth wrote:
The police officers arrived, waded through a waist deep stream as they didn’t know the field had a perfectly good road leading to it, saw it was just a glider outlanding, breathalyzed the pilot but stuck around to help us load the glider into the trailer – which was a bonus!
@alioth, thanks for that priceless story, in recognition of which you are formally exempted from PPR at Glenswinton – but then so is everyone else. There’s no landing fee either, as you’d expect from any Yorkshireman.
P.S. I noticed that Stephen Gardner joined Telegram last September, so perhaps you could fire your GAR info to him that way…
All the braindead acronyms for every single thing with more than two words.
