If you’ve never made a practice call on D&D (121.5MHz) or haven’t done one for ages, it can be an education to try it and see what happens. You then feel less reticent about talking to them at the ‘earliest’ opportunity if you do need them. Whether you have done one before or not, they would welcome a few ‘training fixes’ at the moment if you are airborne, high enough, and have time, and doing it won’t distract you from other tasks – if you can’t remember how or what to say, see the hot news item on FlyOnTrack home page
(For those less familiar with doing it, if you are talking to another frequency just beforehand, make sure they know you are ‘changing’, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t say you are going to 121.5 for a practice. Some ATC units will offer to check for you first to see if D&D are dealing with a real problem which would obviously be a bad time to practice!)
By: FlyOnTrack - 12th March 2010 at 09:54
Everyone likes (positive) feedback so…
Let me pass on a big thanks to everyone who has helped from D&D.
D&D had requested more calls to help check equipment, and also help with their controller training and currency. They are particulary pleased with the results so far – for example, the average number of practice pans and training fixes in a MONTH is 150. On just the Monday-Friday of that first full week (ie: not even the weekend when more fly), they got 124 calls. And practical consequences? Well as long as various technical things, on the Tuesday, they had a controller who was being ‘validated’ for the role. Normally this takes them between 3 and 5 hours. It was all over in only 2 hours, because of the number of training fixes in that period.
So thanks to everyone who has already tried it, BUT remember this wasn’t a one week wonder, they do need them all the time, so keep them coming when you have a minute. I’ve told them also if they can pre-notify a validation (to a particular day), I’m sure enough pilots would make an extra effort then.
By: FlyOnTrack - 26th February 2010 at 16:49
I’ve now added a pamphlet about D&D into both the hot news item and the links page on flyontrack – http://flyontrack.co.uk/content/links.asp -first subsection.
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February 24, 2010 at 8:14 pm