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Oh, also: 1. When an FAA owned and operated facility does not have adequate staffing levels, ATC may elect not to provide the following services: a. Radar Tra
by jonah 11mo ago
Oh, also:
1. When an FAA owned and operated facility does not have adequate staffing levels, ATC
may elect not to provide the following services:
a. Radar Traffic Information Service;
b. Radar Assistance to visual flight rule (VFR) aircraft;
c. Terminal Radar Services for VFR aircraft;
d. VFR Traffic Pattern Operations;
e. Practice Approaches to VFR aircraft;
f. Flight checks services to restore inoperable equipment and approaches;
g. ATC services to parachute operations; or,
h. ATC services to certain special or unusual operations
- kylehotchkiss 11mo agoGiven the current situation, cutting back on private aviation to allow our air traffic controllers, who are picking up second jobs, seems prudent.
- goku12 11mo agoPrudent, yes. But are all of those private aviation? Doesn't commercial civilian and military aviation include any VFR flights? Some of them also sound like emergency/rescue operations.
- rainsford 11mo agoNothing will actually stop those VFR flights from still happening, they'll just be less convenient/safe without certain ATC services. If those services are truly required, they can do IFR instead. So can private pilots just flying for fun for that matter, assuming the pilot has the right rating.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- rainsford 11mo agoThe VFR stuff is always optional for ATC. VFR aircraft can request those things and ATC will usually accommodate, but it's workload dependent and ATC can and does decline, that's the whole tradeoff of flying under VFR rules. I'm less sure on the others, but I'm pretty sure they're all optional as well for ATC. Now the difference might be that ATC will be more likely to deny these requests, which could be somewhat disruptive to flights that were expecting to be approved. But it should never be assumed so hopefully they have backup plans.
- bri3d 11mo agoIn any busy controlled airspace it has never been likely to get flight following, practice approaches, touch and go, etc, and as far as I know controllers have always been allowed to reply to all of these requests with “unable.”
- bombcar 11mo agoFlight following has always been available (to me) as I believe they'd rather be talking to you than having you wandering around (completely legally) in VFR without communications. They've vectored me for other traffic, and done the same for me. The others do directly increase workload and regularly get denied at busy airports (some outright "ban" training activity or charge so much as to make it impractical).