Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Today, I’m here just to share a PSA announcement to remind you guys with the difficulty of dealing with rogues on approach.
As approach controllers, we are often faced with the difficult task of having no flow control to work with. Aircraft will be coming in from the left, right, up, down, space, the center of the Earth, and so forth- it is our job to somehow straighten all that out into a workable line.
In real life, aircraft will pass through countless center and approach frequencies, following prescribed SIDs, STARs, and working with other controllers to merge in safely. Approach controllers don’t have that luxury in Infinite Flight, yet, however. It tends to make our job a tad bit more difficult when it’s busy.
What makes our job extremely difficult, however, are the people who think it’s a good idea to pester us with commands, blind ignorance, or requests that are not needed. Several of them are outlined below:
- Spamming “with you.”
- Changing your mind over and over (ILS to RV to FF, back and forth, all over again).
- Ignoring approach’s instructions just “because.”
- Requesting descent at inappropriate or unnecessary times (we have a plan to descend everybody- there shouldn’t be a need to ask, unless you’re deathly afraid of flying in too high, which should be indicating that approach isn’t doing his job properly).
- Spamming frequency change requests while still inside of approach’s jurisdiction.
With all that said, what can you do to make approach’s job easier and reduce stress on everybody? Well, here’s a few tips on what you can do to achieve that goal.
Steps to ensure a safe and healthy experience:
- Plan out where you’re going before departing a specified airport (of course, there are people who will wrestle with indecision on where to go, which is fine under normal circumstances, but if you see a line of 20+ planes all heading and flowing somewhere, I would highly suggest you indicate to approach with what you’re doing).
- Consider creating a flight plan. They’ll help us understand what you’re doing.
- Cooperate with approach as they vector you around. We have a reason for not guiding you along with 100% of what exactly your flight plan may say- we have a steady stream of planes to work with. If we can accomodate your flight plan, however, we’ll do it!
- Don’t keep notifying us over and over with useless requests- it bumps your flight strip to the top of the list, pushing down more critical strips that we were either about to clear or move into position for the final phase of the approach.
- Try to help approach by being mindful of spacing. We’ll probably be inserting you into a ton of planes, so if you could take the initiative and consider watching your speed, it frees up time for us to deal with more important things.
Bottom Line:
Help us, period. It’s a two man job- we help you, you help us. Just doing something as simple as following instructions helps us. That’s literally all we ask, honestly.
That’ll be all- thanks. Feel free to PM or post with any questions!
-Josh