Flying out of TNCM this afternoon on Expert, I was appalled out how little people knew about how to operate at the airport. For being the primary airport in the Caribbean region, one would expect most would know how to operate at it, but I guess ignorance is rampant.
First off I saw people disregarding taxiways. Newsflash, you always stick to the taxiways, especially on Expert. If you choose not to, enjoy a nice ghosting and probation from the Expert server. Parking stands and gates are not taxiways, they are part of the ramp, which aircraft only pull into to park and pushback from. Aircraft do not travel anywhere else on the ground except on the carefully preplanned taxiways. Meaning if someone is stopped in front of you you stop and dont taxi through the grass or parking to get around them. And it definitely does not mean taxiing through them.
Secondly, a huge rule about TNCM is that because there is very little taxiways, when someone is pushing back from parking you hold your position, especially for those pushing back from Gate A3/A4 as they must pushback partially into the intersecting taxiway. When that is happening, it does not mean you taxi through the parking stands to get to your gate, it means holding position. Because there are no ATC ground ops you are responsible for how you taxi at TNCM.
Thirdly, spacing on approach, come on people this just isnt a problem at TNCM but it is far more important there since there are no quick exit ramps at TNCM, and you should be back taxiing on any non-prop aircraft to exit the runway if you are being realistic. In a nutshell, there should not be 2 aircraft on final at the same time. If you are then the one following should do a 360 for spacing.
Finally, about that backtaxi, if someone is backtaxiing to exit the runway and you still decide to proceed to land after following them in, I really hope you know that you are priority number one to be ghosted on Expert server and shouldn’t complain if you are ghosted.
I was in the takeoff line when TNCM Tower was closed. It was awful. I literally sat there reporting people. It was that bad. Bam! Bam! Bam!
But I decided to hop on and control for a half an hour and sort out the mess that was created within the 5 minutes the previous controller had been gone.
If even one person learns something then it was worth the post.
Should be required to have a community account to be on expert server. A lot of important information is located here. It just saddens me a little bit to hear people on expert acting like it’s TS1 when ATC isn’t around.
I witnessed this mess two. I saw two people run into each other on the taxi without any intent to slow down, and two people enter the runway without paying attention to inbound traffic, one caused the pilot on final to go around, the other decided to screw it and flew into the person on the runway. Luckily, tower came in right before my departure, and started to sort things out.
That’s really sad. If people are in such a hurry to get in the air, why not go to an empty region? I really hope there were enough people there reporting the violations.
I think that the expert sever should have more rules enforced at airports without active atc, like have someone at every major airport do security and if someone does a violation they report it to a moderator for ghosting, because this is rediculous, i hate the training server and i dont want to have the expert server become training, or you could bump it to grade 4 or 5 for expert and have a server for grade 3 like training server 2 Etc…
good post! i agree- i saw an aircraft land through a back taxiing arrival aircraft trying to clear the runway before going around and getting ghosted 👻.
TNCM is better than most of the airports in that region, Antigua or St Kitts on the other hand are very tricky, both operate widebody aircraft IRL as well!
Going back to the issue, if I see this happening, I will start snapping the screenshots and writing these people down…and I will try to contact them on the forum. I suggest others do the same…
It’s really bad on expert now days! People have complete ignorance to what it’s like in the real world. I was at Denver at I said multiple times that I was on final yet this guy still landed, I couldn’t make a go around because I was already on the ground. And this person is on the comunity yet isn’t active. I’ve seen another person on the comunity who is take off from the GA runway in a 787 in KSAN. Something needs to happen!
I have noticed the number of people on the expert has increased. A packed party two weeks ago was 50 people, at TNCM two days ago there was 80. Could be why, a lot of TS1 people finally rolling over to expert, but still having TS1 seriousness and skill.