Yesterday I was flying a route from Cairo to Doha.
On the Ground, Cairo Ground, Tower and center was active, the Controller cleared me for take off.
After taking off, he kept giving me weird instructions on the Center channel, Descend to 14,000 ft, don’t exceed this speed and that, he even got to a point he told me to go as low as 10,000 ft, there were no other traffic or planes in the vicinity.
On leaving the airspace I was relieved, flying over Isreal
All of a sudden, the Center here became active, same guy had jumped channels, he continued messing with me, I moved on to the next airspace, and he again switched onto that, Jeddah I think, and kept dishing out instructions from center, (I was always compelled to tune in to do away with the automatic message that kept telling me I was in an active airspace)
I now decided to ignore him totally.
On flying into Qatar I airspace, you guessed right, Center became active again. But thankfully on approach, he went offline and I landed without noise.
I tried checking who it was controlling, but there was no name.
Those who are interested in IFATC have to pass two tests in order to join followed by training and another test if interested in controlling radar frequencies (center/approach) hence making it almost impossible for your experience to happen on Expert
The thing is, TS is known to have some very nasty players who don’t care a bit about other players’ feelings (Hence the nickname “Trolling Server”). And the fact that literally anyone could control in TS doesn’t really help. Luckily, IFATC don’t just go around recruiting random people, (As @Butter575 said, someone would have to go through a lot of training and tests if they want to be an ATC in expert server) and it is quite certain that this guy wouldn’t stand a chance (If they even bother to sign up for IFATC). Anyways, good luck in making it to ES! It would be much more enjoyable than TS:)
That sounds frustrating, but also avoidable. In TS there are all sorts of nasty surprises waiting around the corner…and there’s nothing you can even do. Once (A few years ago) I met a guy who tried to fly aerobatics around me…with a 78X
This is without a doubt an extremely frustrating experience, I know because I was stuck on training server for a very long time. The best thing that I can recommend for you is to either grind your way to the expert server, or become a controller yourself, and aspire joining IFATC. If you do decide to aspire to join us, I will help you personally. I am rooting for you!
If this ever happens again, tune out of the frequency, go to your audio settings and set ATC volume to 0 in case someone tries to spam you with on guard and you can continue with your flight.
