Hey guys so um I get to confuse about these when I go contact ATC for departure.
Example: Los Angeles tower, Flight 4444 ready for departure runway 25L departing (N.S.E.W)
Do yall base where your departing SID is?
And if there is like South East, what to say on tower? South or East? Thanks!
Not an IFATC but I base that decision off of where I will perform my initial climb relative to the airport. For example, if we look at the SID out of RWY26L at Munich (below), and I am flying the MEBEK transition (east bound), I’ll say I’m departing south. Even though its an east bound departure, by the time I’m east of the RWYs (or by the time I’m flying downwind), I’ll be high enough that I won’t be a problem for any other arriving traffic. In other words, the stages where I am most critical to other aircraft (especially arrivals, departures aren’t quite as critical because everyones flying away from the airport) occur to the south.
Also, you should only communicate a straight out departure if you are flying RWY heading for 10DME or more. Take the south bound SID’s out of EDDM as an example. If I fly via waypoint DM058, it’ll be a straight out departure because the left turns to the south begin after 10 DME.
The direction indicates in which direction you will be leaving tower airspace (boundary about 5-10nm from the airport or climbing over 5000ft AAL).
Straight out should be used when you will be flying runway heading all the way outside tower airspace.
If your direction is SE, NE etc. either south or east works and so on.
you can also find the direction you’re travelling in proc stands for procedures and next the SIDS it will say west, east, north south etc,
No, that’s different. Very often your departing direction will be slightly different than the direction of your SID, they have no correlation.
It’s actually pretty simple!
It all comes to which direction you fly to after taking off, if you use SIDs (which I recommend) you will have their directions just above their names.
Usually, for example, if you depart south / north west, it simply converts to West. That applies to actually all directions
On short, take a very careful look on which direction your SID indicates when you select it before a flight
As I have said, this is slight misinformation. The direction the SID selection indicates does not correlate to your actual departing direction. See below.
That would be a straight out departure since you’re flying runway heading for a decent amount of distance before any turns
Does it come to the runway’s direction then?
See this message above. It’s the direction you will be leaving tower airspace, which won’t always be the same direction as the SID.
Yup, I got so excited by how good of an example those turns were that I forgot another important aspect of reading charts; they are not to scale. Changed it to the MEBEK transition out of EDDM, that’ll make it easier for people to understand the difference if both SIDs are on the same chart. Thanks for pointing it out!
