While on downwind and not having received a clearance for base or till final, you could extend the downwind and call an end-of-downwind to remind your presence to the controller.
I’d always understood that once you are in the circuit, you continue in the circuit. If you fail to get a landing clearance, you go around. But you don’t decide to extend downwind, orbit or anything, simply because you haven’t been cleared onto the next leg of the circuit.
Having a look through some ICAO docs this evening, I came across this
It seems to suggest that your clearance to join downwind or join base, is a clearance to enter the circuit, rather than a clearance to fly that particular leg.
Airborne_Again wrote:
I don’t understand what you mean by “only your FP that is cleared”. Do you mean that you are cleared to final but not cleared to land?
You are cleared to land when you receive an explicit “… RWY XX, cleared to land”. This could happen at any point, depending on traffic and circumstance. It’s just that when you enter with no FP, you could also get a clearance for your shortened FP first, whatever that may be.
Where can we find these ICAO documents?
The above one (doc4444) I found here
http://www.gcaa.com.gh/extweb/images/stories/ais/icaodoc4444.pdf
Other you can find here
Swiss Source
Here is a fun story from when I did my night rating (which was at the time a rating, and required 10 night circuits).
While in he circuit, some aircraft’s PTT switch got stuck somehow, and we got treated to a lengthy explanation of an instructor to his student on the flow checks, common failures and what to do in a reasonably complex aircraft. Tower could not get through, all we got was a squeal.
There were a few aircraft in the circuit, no way to communicate, and no light signals from the Tower. Everyone just carried on with their circuits. When the episode was over (it took ages – i seem to remember 2 or 3 landings) they noticed and got off the frequencey, and tower came back, saying “thanks to xxxx for the lesson; thanks to everyone else for carrying on, aircraft on final, say callsign, cleared to land…”
Frankly, common sense cannot be replaced by detailed rules. On a clear day, with an empty runway and a suspected radio failure – of course you land.
