Creating perfect spacing and separation on approach can be a tough task! Once your hard work is done speed control can be the best tool to help maintain the separation. Whether to build a departure hole for tower, manage a variety of aircraft characteristics, or to simply maintain your minimum IFR separation on final, speed assignments on final offer total control over your traffic!
Available Final Approach Speed Assignments:
180kts until 6 mile final
170kts until 5 mile final
160kts until 4 mile final
Just finished watching. A lovely representation of how proper speed control takes place when radar controllers are active and hard at work. This might even help provide some clarification to pilots as to why they may not be able to go as fast as they’d like when approaching the final legs of their approach. Thanks, Tyler.
Great tutorial Tyler, I do think the approach speeds control are a key feature to better radar control, as tight approaches aren’t easy, however speeds can just ice the cake when used correctly. Look forward to even more tutorials in the future!
I appreciate this Tyler, very helpful. I found myself doing radar control a lot. Yes, it can be challenging, that’s what I love about it, it teaches how to remain calm under pressure and stay focus on my task, even on my personal task as well. Thank you for all the work you do. 🛩
Most definitely! It’s crazy how quickly some of that hard work can go down the drain when trying to build separation if the trailing aircraft is much faster. Appreciate you watching!
Love this tutorial! As for someone who’s in the Radar check ride, this will definitely help me out if I control an airport and have to use speed commands. Can’t wait for the next tutorial’s that will come in the future!
I don’t know ATC can expect pilots to keep these high speeds of 180 to 160 kts on 6 and 5 mile final especially on planes like the 777 without the nose dipping
In a perfect world, I would assume that after this tutorial noone would really ever have to use these commands. Why? Because in a perfect world I would assume that those pilots who watched this tutorial would do these speeds even without ATC instructions and would also maintain adequate separation on their own. But we all know we are not living in a perfect world! :D
Worth mentioning though that some time ago, during ATC Training sessions, downwind and base speeds used to be in the training instructions but nowadays they aren’t there anymore. Why? likely because everyone who attends those sessions follow those ‘rules’ even when they are not being told to do so. It became part of their pilot routine when they are flying on training sessions.
Let’s hope things like speeds and separation will become natural (second nature) to everyone at some point, even without instructions.
Another great tutorial in the series, @Tyler_Shelton ! Thank you very much!
There are often situations that come up where the pilot will be never know why they need to slow down, things they can’t see. In a perfect world they’ll just be able to read my mind and I can control aircraft via telepathy. 😜
