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David Z - 1027224

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Posts posted by David Z - 1027224

  1. This is a great reform by VATSIM... for many years people have been trying to shoehorn a lot of issues within the GRP/COC framework. It's excellent to see that this acknowledges that divisions have moved on from the more simplistic view of ATC. It also seems to cover off some practices that we have had for many years that have had dubious "legality" (and I say that not with malice but as someone who has been the administrator of some of those practices).

    It's great to see procedural towers and traffic management positions acknowledged. This would allow us to train approach controllers in flow management and have a wider pool of people to fill these positions. The knowledge gained in en route training is probably of limited assistance to a flow controller and that is really supposed to be a TMA function anyway.

    From a non-Australian perspective, it is great to see that the CTP event will finally be able to be assisted with radio operators with the minimum of training. In practice, CTP events for many years have seen highly trained controllers be simply swamped with position reports rather than doing the job they have been trained to do.

    A couple of questions that I have:

    Does this new policy bring back the old "Ground Controller" rating? Or would a division like VATPAC be at liberty to still use a combined tower rating and skip S1?

    Are there limits to a division's power on top-down service (eg the subject of the recent thread about en route sectors providing service to procedural tower aerodromes) as a result of 7.05(a)?

    If our upper sectors are to be COACs, do they get grandfathered in rather than having to go through the trial process in 4.07? (We already did something along those lines when the upper sectors were originally brought in)

    There is some discussion in the VATSIM forums about server limitations and how these can't be easily changed (which seems strange to me, considering the source code is available to VATSIM and, at least to my knowledge, was being worked on as recently as a few years ago). Notwithstanding that, does this open the opportunity to revisit visibility limits (e.g. radio operator logged in as TWR for an oceanic position is not going to be particularly useful; VATPAC has advocated (mostly through Greg I think) for increased vis limits for procedural towers; flow positions will still need to have large vis limits--150NM means aircraft pop up only very shortly before they hit top of descent).

  2. I would point out that that policy makes use of both "shall" and "may" to indicate what is required and what is optional. For procedural towers, the word "may" is used to indicate that extending to procedural tower is optional. The thinking here is that if you don't extend, the airspace just reverts to Class G and the aerodrome goes CTAF per ERSA. For the same reason, extending to Gold Coast Approach is explicitly made optional.

    Probably doesn't answer your question on what is general practice 🙃

  3. To my knowledge, there are only a few procedures predicated on night or day and they revolve around visual separation. If you are flying day instead of night, you generally won't have any issues. The other way around you might be asked to self-separation from terrain which might be difficult, but you can just say "sorry can't do it". 

  4. With our top down philosophy, when EN Tower is offline, ML Approach will cover tower's airspace. In the absence of approach, centre will cover for both approach and tower airspace. Note however that since EN is not the primary aerodrome, the approach or centre controller may adopt tower closed procedures, which in the case of Essendon still requires airways clearance, but not taxi, takeoff and landing clearance.

    • Like 1
  5. The DCT is technically required under ICAO standards.

    The departure airport is technically the first point on the route and it is technically a requirement to insert some sort of route between the airport and the next fix, whether that be an airway, SID or DCT. There are actually some airports that are connected to airways, e.g. Mount Hotham, and you can file the airway as the first element in the route (e.g. "Z82 TEMIS V169 ML DCT" could be a route from YHOT to YMML). Similar thing at the destination end.

    For those interested, reference is PANS-ATM Appendix 2.

    That being said, any parser worth its salt survives fine without the DCT and nothing is going to fall over if you leave it out, particularly in the sim world.

  6. Thanks Will. I see now that on the eastern runway SIDs there is indeed an immediate turn away from the other runway. Would I be correct in understanding that "Finals" is purely monitoring (i.e. transfer after turn for intercept) and does not do final vectoring (e.g. from downwind like "Director").

  7. @Will Reynolds I notice in the independent parallel approach user instructions page, it talks about finals controllers monitoring the approach paths for deviations towards an NTZ. I was originally under the impression that the increasing spacing of the runways (c.f. Sydney) meant that this was not necessary and I haven't seen that this is something that is discussed in documentation for similar airports overseas. While I have since found ICAO documentation prescribing this, is this done anywhere else overseas (i.e. where runways are spaced far enough apart to forego PRM)?

    I notice also the SIDs don't provide for diverging departure tracks... is this not required for independent parallel departures or are independent departures not planned to be used?

  8. Not sure what you are trying to achieve here Will... on this flight sim forum, some people have expressed their opinion and you have expressed yours. It is probable that no one here is an air law expert, so if you choose to take legal advice from the people here, then that is at your own risk, but I would suggest that there are people who are better positioned to advise (as Greg as mentioned). If you are hoping that someone is going to validate your thinking, then I would suggest that that is inviting confirmation bias.

    In terms of behaviour in a real aircraft, most people would err on the side of caution. If you choose a different strategy, no one here is going to try and stop you from doing whatever it is you are planning on doing.

    • Like 1
  9. You are right that the AAT's jurisdiction is limited to reviewing decisions made by bureaucrats. They are not a court of law and their power is limited to that of the officer who made the original decision.

    Your last post makes me less suspicious that you are asking for academic purposes... you would be a lot braver than most here if you are going to risk criminal sanctions over what some might describe as a technicality...

  10. While I suspect Will is asking this question more as an academic exercise rather than to obtain legal advice, I would point out that in many industries, cowboy operators try to push the boundaries of what is possibly technically legal and eventually when it gets out of hand and the public demand action, politicians and regulators are forced to tighten things, to much cost and frustration to all involved. So the point is (and to paraphrase Marge Simpson), just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

    • Like 2
  11. Is the 15 mile limitation for the case where there is no ground station or just for 122.8... haven't seen this in any other source? If the former, how does the system know there is no ground station (e.g. there could be one set up on the other side of the world... does this count or is there another range check here)?

  12. On 10/1/2019 at 2:13 AM, Russell Diehl said:

    I wonder how many times aircraft will be inadvertently allowed to lose radio contact because they haven't been handed off to a sector the same controller is also overseeing. I think pilots will need to take initiative by recognising when this is about to occur and politely requesting a frequency change, and at worst, when they do lose contact, realise they can change frequency and reintroduce themselves to an apologetic controller that has neglected to have the pilot change frequency to ensure comms remain active.

    As you might imagine, this is a pretty easy mistake to make. A practice that is used to mitigate this error is to have a letter or code represent each frequency used by the controller and insert this into the aircraft tag as a memory aid. For example, you might use a few key digits of the radio frequency... say you are controlling SNO and WOL, you may have "24" and "25" (for 124.0 and 125.0) as your codes, if you see a "24" at Canberra heading east, this would remind you that you need to change that aircraft to 125.0.

    • Like 1
  13. While the comments regarding participation being seasonal are spot on, something that I would suggest is looking at the overall movement, e.g. by comparing year-on-year numbers for the same time of the year. 

    The loss of members beyond regular season movements has always been present. Life happens and people change their priorities. This gets balanced by new members coming in, but recruitment is something that has always been difficult to manage on a divisional level. Major events attracting international crowds, major developments such as the release of new sceneries (e.g. FlyTampa Sydney) or the upcoming AFV are all opportunities to try to draw people in (or back in) if we capitalise on them. Experience from many years ago was that recruitment drives at airshows, conferences, etc. had generally been unsuccessful in actually getting conversions into new members but of course is something that can be tried again with new strategies.

    When it comes to stuff like training policy, there has to be a big picture view. There are plenty of great ideas and management will always say that there isn't the resources to do it. There is a balance between spending people's time on something vs the benefits. Growing the membership and attracting more people to join the staff is the best way to shift that balance.

    • Like 3
  14. Something that I will clarify is that during the period of the standing approval (i.e. MRM times), a controller may log into a Dep position instead of the App position. Where only one TMA controller is online, that controller will cover the whole TMA. However, if a controller prefers Dep, then he/she may log into that position so that when a second TMA controller arrives, he/she may retain the Dep position. This is similar to our routine operation of SNO/WOL.

    The context of the standing approval is that at the time we had pretty healthy activity levels during this event. You actually couldn't get an ATC spot if you turned up after say 6pm. Canberra and Avalon were being staffed because people wanted to control. This was a way of allowing more people to have the opportunity to participate on the ATC side and was only made more permanent after a trial period and feedback from the community. The feedback supported our decision to restrict the approval to Dep and not Director.

    While there is certainly great novelty in additional positions (and there was also some desire to build "TMA team" skills to better support major events), from an Ops side we felt we were restrained in that this also introduces complexity. The kind of complexity I'm talking about is easily seen in the controller documentation for major TMAs in the US (e.g. SOCAL, New York, etc... as an extreme case) This complexity must be adequately documented so that controllers can prepare themselves in advanced. 

    Further to Greg's comments on maximising coverage... while it is up to the management of the day to set the policy direction, I would suggest that if there is tower, TMA at each airport and 1 en route, the opening of a second TMA position at one airport is probably no better/worse than opening a second en route, but of course would depend on the traffic situation.

  15. The handling of a large number of connections to a single server is non-trivial and is not necessarily resolved by better hardware. There is work in (very slow) progress to improve the way FSD handles and processes connections, from the network level (how connections are treated - i.e. forked process, threaded, event driven, etc.) to things like how range-checking are performed.

    These are important to the scaleability of FSD - for example, decreasing the update interval for clients from 5s to 1s is not possible today because the range checking (which is done with every position update) has to be done roughly n^2 times (where n is the number of total connections to the network) and this is not achieveable within a reduced update interval (geodesic calculations are far more computationally expensive than calculations on a Cartesian system).

    There are ways to get around this issue, but they are non-trivial and of course requires someone to put in the time to make the change. In the past 12 months, there have probably been less than half a dozen people contribute to the code and most of those people have been too busy to make more than minor changes. (We need help!)

    • Thanks 1
  16. I'm a bit late, but I would point out for those who haven't been around as long... Sean is spot on that for our purposes the COR is the ruling document on which region a chunk of airspace belongs to and then the RD then decides on the split for divisions. You will note that there are plenty of non-Australian territories within VATPAC airspace, most notably in the past we have had French nationals attempt to make a claim on New Caledonia and the French Polynesia.

    • Like 1
  17. It is with regret that I advise the community that Eoin Motherway and Dan Martin have resigned from their positions citing real world commitments. Both of these gentlemen have made an enormous contribution to our organisation and on behalf of VATPAC I would like to express our gratitude.

    An announcement regarding a new division director is imminent and the incoming division director will be making the arrangements for the transition period while we find suitable replacements.

    • Like 1
    • Sad 6
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