Peter wrote:
What is an FMC
Frequency Monitoring Code aka Listening Sqawk
Everyone should know about FMCs. If you don’t is a big failure of comms on the part of NATS and CAA
https://airspacesafety.com/listening-squawks/
Everyone should know about FMCs.
Yes, but looks very much a UK specific thing though. As we’re on a European-wide forum here, does the rest of the world use them?
James_Chan wrote:
Does the rest of the world use them?
Other countries are certainly looking to follow the UK lead; I don’t know whether any have done so yet.
“Everybody” has known about listening squawks (when flying near some CAS you set up their “listening squawk” and set the radio to the corresponding frequency, and that way you are not taking up their ATC workoad, but if you bust their CAS they can call you) for years but I have never before heard the term “FMC” used for this.
I’ve done a couple of busts on which the use of this might in theory have helped but I doubt it because I was in CAS for such a short time and then, having sh1tted myself and cleaned myself up, was busy getting out of there at the greatest possible rate of descent etc. Both were “processed” by the CAA however 
My feeling is that this system is useful mostly for pilots who fly a “planned” route but misread the map, misread their plog, etc.
It isn’t likely to prevent post-infringement action, from what I can see, because by the time they call you, you will have already busted.
Is there any current LTMA data on what % of infringers get sent by the CAA to the 3-stage process, when using the FMC / listening squawk, versus not using it?
AIUI, NATS are still required to report the infringement to the CAA.
I wonder why no other country operates listening squawks. There are plenty of busy airspaces e.g. Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, etc.
Timothy wrote:
There were very few infringements, and, as far as I remember, no loss of separation when the pilot is using FMC.
Some of this is possibly because the kind of pilot who uses FMC is also the kind of pilot who’ll have some kind of moving map, and will do a modicum of flight planning in order to avoid inadvertently infringing airspace in the first place.
I spend my ‘entire life’ flying around the edges of complex Class B airspace, each segment of which is controlled by a different person on a different frequency, with many such segments. I rarely talk to anybody but the Class D towers or CTAF for the airports at which I’m operating, obviously on a different frequency. The concept of tuning in additional frequencies and possibly different squawk codes after leaving tower, to allow each Class B controller to potentially contact me if I were to potentially enter Class B etc by mistake strikes me as silly, a totally impractical and distracting ‘solution’ if the airspace of interest is anything more complex than a simple single frequency Class D around an airport.
The solution is rational airspace design that doesn’t promote issues through bad design, large enough that if an off frequency plane cuts a corner or whatever, the world doesn’t come crashing down. Then if the size of a given airspace block presents an issue for the VFR pilot, he simply calls up the controller and gets a clearance to cross – its his choice, no Class A is necessary. The UK airspace and ATC situation is much like UK car design circa 1975: patches applied to obsolete design, applied by people with inadequate resources and background, attempting to solve bigger issues that aren’t being properly confronted. Piling on additional layers of distracting nonsense is not the solution.
Silvaire wrote:
Piling on additional layers of distracting nonsense is not the solution.
Unfortunately it’s all that those involved are able to do.
We’ve ended up with a system where no one person in charge is able to rip it up and declare that we need to start again from scratch. As Timothy has said, the CAA aren’t even empowered to dictate airspace design.
The proper solution is to nationalise air traffic services (and probably the major airports), start from a blank piece of paper and remove the business interests from airspace design. It’ll never happen though.
