mrivc211 said:
Exactly how I'm starting to feel about things when I have to deal with work, outside of work! If I'm at work, I'd like to be paid for it.
There's this underground problem in ATL where we have these RNAV departures and there's an entire system set up where you taxi out, check into another frequency to tell him your runway and initial fix, then he clears you to talk to tower.
This is all done to avoid departing one of the north runways and turning the wrong direction and having a traffic conflict.
It's happened a few times, there have been violations both in the pilot ranks and also controller errors which led to time off/violations as well.
So I flew with one of the program managers once and gave him my speech about we could save memory in the FMS system by only having North and West departures selectable with the North complex runways, and South and East departures selectable only with South complex runways.
So basically, it would electronically "remove" the possibility of turning the wrong direction if there is a runway/initial fix mismatch.
"What if the North runway complex is closed?"
Simple, if there's a North or West departure departing the south complex, well, there's always the ATL5 departure that the non RNAV equipped aircraft use every day without the turns.
I wrote a report about it a year ago.
Silence.
However, every five minutes in traning "confirm the runway! confirm the initial fix!" checklist changes, procedure changes, blah blah blah.
Simple, cost-effective fix without changing checklists, procedures having guys get violated, extra controllers to listen to you say "27L, GEETK" (or whatever the heck it is) before switching to tower.