Why are people so scared to declare? (SWA case)

Depending on what I’ve got going on, playing 20 questions with well-intentioned controllers may be counterproductive.

I had a bunch of electrical stuff take a poop (highly technical description for “entire emergency bus was accidentally wired to a 5 amp breaker”) on departure from a service center. Just telling departure that I’d lost a radio and needed to head back to the service center was way easier than explaining everything and declaring when all I needed from ATC was to get me turned around and sequenced back in.

I remember a group I volunteered with having an alternator go out in flight on a Cherokee. It was severe VMC and they were in the pattern. The pilot told tower he’d be a full stop and told him where they’d be parking in case the battery died before landing. That turned into tower declaring an emergency for him, fire trucks showing up, and the parents of the kids on board absolutely losing it. Completely unnecessary and avoidable. Yes, a lot of pilots are cautious about the E-word. On the flip side, “helpful” controllers who mean well frequently make things far more difficult than necessary.
 
NovemberEcho said:
Truth. If you’re an emergency things like airspace boundaries, speed limits, and several other rules disappear. If you tell me you need priority but not an emergency I’m not going to delay you but I’m not going to go crazy. If you’re an emergency and need to get down now I will send the 10 people ahead of you around, stop departures and put the center into a hold.
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I've used the "no speed limit" on a couple occasions during medical emergencies to get people on the ground more quickly. (one was a possible stroke, the other was a serious scalding incident on an FA covering a large area and the FA sounding shocky).

If you need it, use it. Not everything needs to go to 11, but if lives or long-term health are at stake, that's a situation we're there to manage.

I do really think there's a combination of factors, though. When I've had obvious emergencies, it's been easy to go "yep, we're declaring. Clear a path! I'm going home." But when it's less-obvious stuff, we know that you're going to move heaven and earth, and we don't really want to make the news. Because for every thread like this, we know there's going to be one where people are going to be ripping into somebody for declaring an emergency over something "stupid." We know that if our reasons aren't found to be valid after the fact, we may get looked at funny by our peers, or the company, or our passengers, or the media. And pilots, even airline pilots, are super mission-oriented, and we want to just keep the operation going.

But honestly, dealing with situations like that is part of the job. Build the team, gather information, work the problem, arrive at a decision, follow through, progressively evaluate.

If, at the end of the day, you were too conservative, so be it.
 
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