Oh no! Christmas Day is the only day of the year which is relatively quiet, although getting busier year after year. It’s the only stress-free day of the year for us, and the lower traffic level allows many more controllers to take leave to be at home.

I have visions of clouds of 150s and Cherokees in the circuit and all us ATCOs tearing our hair out because we don’t know what to do! VFR? What’s that????

Shouldn’t all taxiways be of universal size

Perhaps they should, but they aren’t. It depends on which category a/c the taxiway is designed to cope with. Even at Heathrow we have some taxiways certain a/c aren’t permitted to use because of their size.

Let’s hope that the lessons learned in our move to our new tower will be absorbed!

FYI,

The above passage was an article written by Rod Stone of Dow Jones Newswires/Wall Street Journal, and was syndicated across various news services on September 14th 2007

Perhaps it would have been prudent to credit that. Readers of this thread might be confused and think that you wrote it all, regardless of courtesy to the author.

Would be very interesting to see FRA , LHR etc 10 years from now and compare the avg. size of aircraft taking off and landing there

Interesting point….Since I’ve been working at LHR, March 1999, I’d guess that the average size (or I guess the average pax capacity per a/c would be more accurate) has decreased. Back in 99, BA LHR short haul was mainly B752 and B763, with ten A320s. Now the vast majority of it is A319/320.

Sunday’s Flying Legends

I thought the inclusion of the F-15E was great. Some fantastic close formation flying (at one point, in the break, too close….my brother took a photo at the instant the F-15E got a bit too close to one of the Mustangs, and you can clearly see the elevators in full deflection nose-down in an effort to open the gap). So the commentary was OTT, but I’m sure that to most of the crowd it was funny in a way unintended to the commentator.

Other highlights: Stephen Grey in the Bearcat, the I-15, and the Mustang tailchase.

The lowlights? After a whole day of exhorting us to stay on after the flying finished to ease the exit jams, to find all the museum buildings closed so soon after the balbo fly past was irritating. The thunderflies were also annoying. We had to move off the ‘tank bank’ and move near the crowd line just by the kink so we could eat our food.

The only other irritant was after staying on until past 1900, and getting straight out of the car park, turning left as instructed and everything flowing smoothly, spending ten minutes in a jam waiting for what seemed like virtually every other car to do a u-turn just when the cones ended, so they could head straight back to the M11. 😡

If things are normal, we can land on both runways from 0600-0700 local. In practice, this usually stops around 0635-0645 as the peak inbound rush tails off, although it’s very variable on the winds both over the Atlantic and over Russia.

Before 0600L we technically should be on the ‘night alternation’ runway, which might very well be different to the designated landing runway that will be in use up to 1500L if we’re on westerlies.