I recently was leaving the gate at a small Midwestern airport. Small, of course, is relative. It was a Class D facility with two or three runways. There was a time when I would have considered such a facility to be daunting and big compared with the single-runway airports I was used to visiting.
But in my current airline job, Class D rates as small compared with some of the Class B monstrosities I get to visit on a regular basis.
On this particular day, a pilot in a general aviation airplane was struggling mightily with radio communications, and when the student was transmitting, I could hear the CFI coaching in the background. When the CFI was transmitting, I could hear the frustration in his own voice as he was trying to get the flight under way. The pilot in question could have been on his first dual flight, his first flight to a towered airport, or just his first flight to a towered airport in a number of years — I don't know. The CFI, though, did push the student to ask for progressive taxi instructions, presumably to get the student accustomed to the practice and to show that the controllers really are there to help. The controller in this case really was trying to help, in a friendly, patient tone of voice.
Since we were getting ready to taxi to the runway, my first officer made an effort to speak a little slower and to use the terminology required by the Aeronautical Information Manual to talk to ground control, figuring that the intrepid aviator elsewhere on the airport might gain from hearing somebody else request a taxi clearance. Although we didn't need to ask for progressive instructions, here's a secret: Even the pros make mistakes sometimes.
It isn't unique to flying, either. News anchors stumble over words, football players drop the softest throws, professional golfers miss the occasional gimme putt, and baseball players let fly balls bounce off their heads and over the wall. I once went to a Broadway stage production, and during a fairly dramatic scene, the actors on stage started laughing uncontrollably, to the point that the audience reveled in their embarrassment. My point is that it happens to all of us.
On the ground, many of the large airports have developed a system that the controllers like to use for moving traffic. Although the logic of what they are doing may escape you, rest assured that they do what they do for a reason. The problem, even for airline pilots, is that the controllers all assume that the pilot has been at that airport before, and when they give taxi instructions, they expect him to know exactly what they want him to do.
And, believe it or not, sometimes the airline pilot is not familiar with a given airport, and has to ask for help. The first time I went to Dallas-Fort Worth, I was flying with someone who had been there only once before, and the taxi route we got was rather circuitous, and the only hope we had was to ask for help. Although we didn't use the word progressive, we did stop the airplane at taxiway intersections when we had the slightest question about where to go. Did the controllers get annoyed? Maybe a little, but such is life. It isn't their ticket on the line. In our case we had just started service to Dallas, so they were aware that we were new to the area and gave us a little bit of slack — but not much.
Along the same lines, in this day of GPS-direct navigation, it doesn't take long to figure out that pilots are flying around with their charts stowed neatly in their bags. First the controller issues a clearance to a new fix, one that is not on the original flight plan. Then the pilot reads back the clearance with an inflection of curiosity in his voice. The pilot then calls back shortly afterward, asking for a station identifier and spelling.
Controllers sometimes get agitated, especially when they are busy, if they perceive that pilots are just too lazy to pull out a chart and look up the fix for themselves — and this is too often the case. Take the time to look for a fix on your own if you have a rough idea of where it may be. Intersections can be more challenging, and most controllers will offer the spelling of a distant intersection as part of the initial clearance.
This is not a problem unique to one segment of aviation or another. Airline pilots who have flown FMS- and GPS-equipped airplanes for years frequently do not pull en route charts out of their bags. Most of the time the routes are the same ("canned") and they are familiar with the various reroutes that might come. But not always, and there are days when we need more help than we'd like to admit.
To take the same problem further, sometimes a simple clearance can turn into a tortuous exercise as even the most seasoned airline veteran has trouble deciphering a clearance, no matter how clear it may seem. Fly enough and you'll see this both from the point of view of the (amused) observer and the (frustrated and embarrassed) recipient. The confusion often comes from fixes that sound familiar to ones you are already aware of, or from words that sound the same (the words to, two, and too), or when you get a clearance that doesn't come close to resembling your original flight plan, and when you start writing, often you can't read your own scrawl.
After multiple transmissions between a pilot and an exasperated controller, the pilot finally got the full read-back correct. When the controller finally said the magic words, "Read-back correct," another pilot in another airplane jumped on the frequency and said, "What we have here is a failure to communicate...." Touché, and yes, humor does help.
The same is true on the ground, and sometimes even up-to-date charts don't help. I was working a flight from Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, to Dallas-Fort Worth several years ago and, because of weather, we were forced to divert to Shreveport, Louisiana, a city my company did not serve at the time. By the time we landed, it was dark, and when the controller issued our taxi instructions, we proceeded on to the first taxiway so instructed. Looking at the airport diagram, we could not make sense of the controller's instructions. Immediately, the controller asked if we were using Jeppesen charts. We were. Turns out that the Jepp airport diagram had a couple of taxiways mislabeled.
"Ground, we'd like a progressive then." Humility knows no bounds.
When in doubt, ask for help.
Chip Wright, of Hebron, Kentucky, is a Canadair Regional Jet captain.
