Also NY Tracon management has a "quality assurance" office which one of
the guys gave us numbers for back at a safety meeting. When I got
verbally berated for flying legally I called that number and spoke to an
individual. Gave him date/time/tail number and where I talked to the
controller and they pulled the tapes.

As a quality assurance issue you might want to express your misgivings
as to being given an awkward at the least and possibly dangerous at the
worst clearance.

Robert

Bob Gardner wrote:
One of the ways to educate controllers is by using ASRS. When the NASA guys
at Moffet Field call NY TRACON, the offending controller(s) will get the
word.

Bob Gardner

"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...

Yesterday, we had filed /G (with a CNX-80). Our clearance was KPOU IGN
V157 HAARP -D- KHPN. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

HPN was using the ILS-16 (http://204.108.4.16/d-tpp/0612/00651I16.PDF) We
were on V157 somewhere north of VALRE when we got "fly heading 200 to
intercept, um, no, tell you what, proceed direct FARAN, cleared ILS-16".
This is a pretty common thing for NY Approach to say, but as I study the
chart now, I don't think it's legit.

I asked NY Approach for an initial heading to FARAN and got back an
annoyed
sounding, "it's the initial approach fix" (along with a 200 heading). The
problem is, it's NOT an IAF. Which means that you can't pick it out of
the
menu of IAFs for the approach. And since it wasn't on our original route,
you can't pick it out of the flight plan. You need to spell it out letter
by letter from the database (which takes a while, hence the request for an
initial heading).

The alternative would be to select IGN as the IAF from the approach menu,
execute that, then go into the flight plan and select direct to FARAN.
Except that it takes a while to figure that out, and I'm not even sure if
the box will let you do it.

It was my understanding that there's only two legit ways to clear a flight
for an approach -- give them direct to an IAF, or give them vectors to the
FAC. In this case, "direct FARAN, cleared ILS" is neither. Am I correct
that this is a bum clearance?

If they want to send people direct to FARAN (which they often do), why
don't they just declare FARAN to be an IAF? Then it would get into the
database that way, it would show up on everybody's IAF menus, and we would
all be happy campers.