NAS and associated computer system

Snowbird wrote:



What can happen -- what's happened to us -- is that the tower
controller doesn't worry his head about your flight plan.

Yes, but it has to be typed in and accpeted by the computer. At all the
class C airspaces all the controllers work all the positions at various
times thru the day. You don't drop a handwritten strip down the tube
and expect the radar controller to handle it.


He
figures the tracon's gonna vector you and the center's gonna
reroute you anyway so why should he sweat. He says "cleared
as filed".

The tower guy says cleared as filed if the strip tells him to say
cleared as filed.


Now you're handed off to Tracon, and he looks at
your flight plan and realizes he has no clue where you're going.

Have that happen a lot. And the location identifier book is all the way
over there. So you say resume own nav and see where he goes. If I want
to nail it down to 50% of the sky I'll look at the final altitude and
see which way he's going.


But he figures you'll be out of his airspace before he sorts
it out, so let the center controller sweat it. He queries,
"Grumman 12345, say on-course heading", you respond, and
that's sufficient for him. 10 minutes later, you're handed
off to Center.

Yep, do that too if you're a slow mover and there's traffic.



Well, the next Center isn't going to be fobbed off with
"on-course heading blahblahblah" on the handoff, so the buck
stops with the first Center guy (this is our experience, mind,
YMMV).

The center has the same route on his strip as I have on mine. He will
move you for traffic, not because he doesn't know where you're going.

So if Newps
(sorry
to pick on him) transposes two numbers and has you headed in the
opposite
direction than you intend to fly, no one will know until you take off
from a non-towered airport headed west with the controller having
carefully
arranged your separation believing you're headed eastbound.

No controller looks at a set of lat/lons and says to himself..."Flying
east today." A lat/lon is for the computers benefit, it has zero value
to a controller.