Friday, Apr 04, 2003 at 09:53
G’day Dolfn,
I don’t want to hijack Allyn’s thread, but with your background in aviation I though you might find this yarn amusing [or otherwise]
My background is a professional radio operator, and many years ago in Singapore [back in the sixties] we had the habit of keeping a spare receiver [speaker turned on] tuned to the ICAO frequency of 8870Khz to help while away the boredom during quiet evening shifts.
One night there was a British Airways flight en route from
Darwin to Singapore, and he announced himself to Singapore with his “Speedbird” callsign, gave his position, and requested permission to descend to a certain height as part of the pre-approach for his eventual descent into Singapore.
Singapore’s answer was to tell him that as he was currently in Indonesian air space that permission would have to come from Jakarta.
Duly noted the skipper of the BA flight called Jakarta with the same request.
Jakarta’s response was to ask his final destination – to which he was told “Singapore”
Jakarta then responded by telling him he had to get permission from Singapore.
Back to Singapore with the same request.
Confusion building – remember, this poor bugger is closing on Singapore at a fair speed while these blokes are arguing the toss.
End result – somebody used their initiative.
Darwin stepped in [I think from memory
Darwin was FIR controller] gave the BA flight permission to descend, and then ordered both Singapore and Jakarta to contact him immediately via “other means” [obviously to slip them a few choice words]
One very relieved BA Captain thankful for the Aussie presence in the region.
:) :) :)
Enjoy the bush
DennisN
FollowupID:
10448