Hello! First off I’ll say, I know in the real world, and to some extent, IF, a controller can do the duties of controllers below them. Center is qualified for all duties, APP/DEP can do each other’s jobs plus tower/ground, and tower can do ground. Most times when I’m on tower, and there is no ground, people pushback/taxi at their discretion, and stay on unicom, seems pretty accurate and typical. But sometimes I have people who are ready to pushback/taxi, including grade 5 pilots contact me on tower requesting t/o from rwy xx. In this situation I will reply “hold short rwy xx”, the closest I can give to taxi clearance as tower. If I’m not overly busy, this type of request doesn’t bother me, much better than some of the nonsensical requests I’ve seen. My question is, is this right/wrong for them to do? I know it’s not really typical, on the other hand if it’s not busy, it’s not that bad either. At first I thought this seemed improper, but as I’ve seen grade 5s do it, and since tower is qualified to control ground, maybe it’s fine. Maybe either way (contacting unicom, or tower) can both be appropriate. I just wanted opinions on this. Also, just maybe other pilots or controllers will see this and learn it. As I said, as a not busy controller it doesn’t bother me. Though as pilot, I personally use unicom until I taxi short of a rwy. One advantage I can see to having them contact tower is the pilot can be certain of which rwy tower would prefer them on for less interference and a quicker departure.
You are correct, this is a mistake in the context of Infinite Flight, although in small real life airports, tower often handles ground movement either.
For IF, I think the appropriate response would be “contact XXX unicom”.
Adding on to Roy, the pilot shouldn’t even contact tower with any messages until they are in steady / ready position for take off, which would be holding short / in line for takeoff… This is the training server I presume…
Thank you. I do know tower does sometimes control ground at smaller airports, that’s why it got me thinking about it. In rl it can be the right thing to do, but it feels like unicom is more appropriate for IF. Maybe it could be at towers discretion if they aren’t too busy. Hmm, now I’m curious if other ATC would ghost for that. I’m thinking probably not since it’s not ignoring atc, just being slightly incorrect.
On Expert we have the Check Help command available, which I would use followed by an instruction to contact Ground. I do that with pilots who switch to Tower as soon as they have their taxi clearance and are still a long way from the runway, particularly if there is other traffic around and I may need to be communicating Give Way instructions to them from Ground ATC during their trip to the threshold.
As @jghastings pointed out us IFATC will typically use a “check help pages” command, to notify the pilot they are doing something wrong but it is not ghostable. On training server I would just ignore them, or I guess “hold short” could work aswell. When pilots start spamming takeoff requests is it when it becomes a problem, and I actually had to ghost someone the other day for constantly requesting takeoff from the gate, after I told him check help pages multiple times.