You’ve never met an ATC… 
Also, according to my ATC friends, the movie Pushing Tin takes a few liberties with reality but is otherwise surprisingly accurate.
4 Likes
If the ATC was in line, then how could that possibly be a threat?
ATC is not the tech sector. This was unprofessional behavior, and the Irish pilot knew it, and ultimately said as much.
Pilot might have been better off making a joke with the guy
He did, and that’s not so great either. It’s not twitter. Did we hear the same exchange?
1 Like
But what about the Lucky Charms?
3 Likes
As a private pilot who has flown over NYC many, many times, this didn’t sound too bad other than the arguing at the beginning about who has what equipment, and then the part at the end where the Aer Lingus pilot felt he had to make a statement to ATC about having done nothing wrong. Air traffic around NY is incredibly dense and complicated, and I have had controllers hold me outside the airspace and wait until they could get me in. ATC shouldn’t be questioning the pilot’s thoughts about the weather too strongly, but it is fine if they say their radar shows whatever they see. The pilot has to appreciate that there can be other aircraft ATC is managing and has plans for that he isn’t privy to. It is a tough job for both, but I have heard tenser conversations on the air, although probably not over such a prolonged time.
1 Like
There is a thread about this on pprune (an aviation forum) and the general consensus is that NYC controllers do have a high opinion of themselves, and the pilot was 100% professional all through the exchange. It wasn’t that long ago that an aircraft departing NYC lost its vertical stabilizer and crashed. This can happen in turbulence, caused by storms. The pilot has the ultimate say on where the aircraft goes and was within his rights to nope of of that volume of airspace.
4 Likes
The pilots on the line for keeping all souls safe and is looking directly at his odds. I’ll take him for my pilot any time, he wants to keep me alive and I like that.
3 Likes
I second the fact that NYC is some very dense airspace.
The Departure controller is just a small piece in the ATC structure. His job is to make sure that aircraft leave the ground in a safe, timely fashion, and he’s coordinating this with a bunch of other controllers: arrival, tower, and ultimately en-route. If an aircraft deviates from its agreed departure procedure in such a busy airspace, it puts a huge amount of work load on the controller, as he/she now has to re-route other aircraft in addition to providing minute by minute vectors to the aircraft in question to keep it separated from arriving and other local traffic; since most of the other traffic is on a different frequency with a different controller, he’s got to then communicate with those other controllers.
I can kind of understand if the controller was being a little snippy.
2 Likes
It was a while ago. Don’t sell yourselves short, though. The US publication “National Interest” lists you as 4th, behind the US, China and Russia. And a significant amount of Russia’s fleet is quietly rusting away, probably not even seaworthy. So realistically, I’d put you at #3.
2 Likes
Aer Lingus, such a cunning airline…
(I can’t believe no one else went there)
8 Likes
Seems to me like this would’ve gone fine if the ATC controller had just said “I haven’t had other reports of bad weather there, but I’ll take your word for it”. It’s the questioning of the pilot’s judgement that makes the exchange go bad and that wasn’t necessary.
4 Likes
Yeah I think part of the issue is that weather radar on aircraft has a much better view of the weather than the radar available to ATC. One reason for this is that the aircraft sees what is directly ahead of it, while that view may be partly obscured by other weather from the perspective of ground radar.
And there is not much point having a weather radar if you don’t follow its advice.
1 Like
Many years ago I had a job as a pseudo-pilot. It was part of a simulation to trial different ATC methods. My job was to fly pretend aircraft by typing stuff in to a computer terminal, while calling and responding to controllers over the radio. The controllers actually sat on the other side of the same room. We pseudo-pilots were a bunch of randoms with nothing to do with flying, but the controllers were real, off-duty air traffic controllers. It was fascinating. The controllers knew it was just a simulation, but they treated it as real. Type in the wrong heading (which they’d see on their simulated radar display) and expect to be told. Get too close to another aircraft and they’d get really excited.
Whatever the scientists wanted to try (basically packing more aircraft into a sector), the controllers always came back to the same point. “If your radar fails, I need to control my airspace with a radio and paper strips”. And they could - we tried. No radar, just a row of pieces of paper listing call sign, destination, heading and flight level, and they can just hold it all in their head. Truly amazing. I learned to respect ATCs.
9 Likes
Can we all agree, at least, that on a relative scale, if thus is the biggest “argument” we have ever heard between ATC and pilot, humanity is in pretty damn good hands. While there was some strsss, they stayed professional and stuck to the task at hand.
Their argument was essentially, “Good Day, sir…I said good day!”
5 Likes
Not as far away as you might think. The NY TRACON is located in Westbury, NY, and that aircraft flew roughly over that location, coincidentally about where the center of that WX was located.
2 Likes
“good day” is a typical part of certain ATC phraseologies. For example, “Oceanic 815, contact Seattle Center on 127.6, good day.” “127.6 for Oceanic 815, good day”.
2 Likes
I got to visit the Denver TRACON a few years back. They said that they have a triple redundant system for managing it with radar these days. I asked what happened if it all failed, and got the response of, “Well, we get to go home!”
They mentioned that they could try to use the paper strips, but they’d rather close the airspace over get it wrong.
It’s crazy watching the sheer number of aircraft moving around on those screens and then watching the controllers pop between aircraft to talk to them. It’s like watching someone play a realtime strategy game, except that there are planes with real people instead of it just being a game.
4 Likes
Its shortened to g’day out here. 
But as I understand it the Aer Lingus aircraft was departing, and while he obviously had to follow a SID its not like he had to stay in line for an arrival. There is a lot more scope for vertical separation on departure due to different rates of climb.
I am a former ATC software engineer and reading through forum posts on this incident I did wonder if there is potential for the diffusion of WX radar data in this environment. The ground based radar is only going to show weather which has not been obscured by other weather. The aircraft sees what is directly ahead of it. Part of this may boil down to the controller just not having the same view of the airspace as the crew.
4 Likes
Probably not a bad thing in the long run.
2 Likes
that’s quite the story… mike
on a lighter note
I like the flannan isle mystery podcast numerio 196
by futility closet…
That was my thought too. The TRACONs WX isn’t perfect, but it was right over him. Then again, they don’t exactly have any windows.
