Uncontrolled airport dept question

[73belair]

Cool... Thanks all. Both the FO and I agree on what we heard. So I hope we are not just talking our selves into it.

 

[cjdriver]

Don't forget, the controller doesn't want any more scrutiny than you do. Forget about it.

 

[pilotyip]

Was it VFR or IFR?

 

[CFI2766]

Was it VFR or IFR?

I believe that it would always have been IFR for a pt. 121 op. It might have been VMC or IMC, but always IFR.

 

[pilotyip]

I ment IMC, VMC, but what does 121 have to do with this, did I miss something? We are 121, and have an Op Spec that we could depart in VMC from an untowered airport and pick up a clearance within 50 NM of the departure airport.

 

[sweptback]

I ment IMC, VMC, but what does 121 have to do with this, did I miss something? We are 121, and have an Op Spec that we could depart in VMC from an untowered airport and pick up a clearance within 50 NM of the departure airport.

ASA has that opspec too. I've done it a couple times, you just have to call ahead and make sure there are no delays to your destination.

 

[Nevets]

If it's a non-sole-source incident that's your fault (the FAA gets wind of it some other way), then without ASAP the worst case scenario is you get a violation in your file, possibly accompanied by a suspension or revocation of your certificate. The best case scenario would be a letter of warning in your file.

With ASAP in a non-sole-source incident that's your fault, the best case scenario is an electronic response (it goes away); worst case scenario is you get a warning letter (which is not a violation, and it drops out of your file after two years). So you can see that if there's ANY chance of the FAA finding something out (which is always the case), then you are always better off with ASAP. You can't lose.

Yes, and if its the controller's fault, he gets his pipi slapped instead. Had this happen to me once when the controller said he was going to violate me for not accepting his clearance. Turned out he was wrong and just brought that attention to himself. I guess he didn't get the memo about not bringing attention to himself.

Reminds me of this story:

[FONT=&quot]ALPA’s Legal and Engineering and Air Safety Departments team up to defend a pilot in an FAA enforcement case[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]By Jan W. Steenblik, Technical Editor[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]September 2008 [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Air Line Pilot • [/FONT][FONT=&quot]23[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]On the evening of [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Oct. 19, 2004, Capt. Robert “Rusty” Tillman was the pilot flying, and F/O Barry Smyth was the pilot monitoring, on Delta Air Lines Flight 1619, B-737-300 service from Salt Lake City to Denver. The weather at SLC was night VMC, with clouds at 10,000 to 11,000 feet MSL, and icing reported in the clouds. After takeoff from Runway 16R, the pilots complied with their takeoff clearance— a right turn to a heading of 280 degrees, climb and maintain 10,000 feet. While they were on the assigned heading and before reaching 10,000 feet, the SLC TRACON controller instructed the pilots to turn right to 310 degrees and climb to Flight Level 230. Unfortunately, during the turn to 310 degrees, while the airplane was in cloud and icing conditions and the pilots were confirming that all the anti-icing was turned on, the captain’s flight director unexpectedly suffered a mechanical malfunction that caused it to continually command a right turn. Tillman, handflying with the flight director, overshot the assigned heading. Smyth said, “Watch your heading,” and Tillman began to turn back to 310. “We figured we went about 20–25 degrees beyond the assigned heading,” Tillman recalls, “before I started correcting back to 310. “The controller said, ‘Where are you guys going? Turn right to 090.’ A moment later, the controller said, ‘No, never mind, go back to 310.’ So we made kind of an S-turn.” Climbing through 11,000 feet, the B-737 had broken the 3-mile separation “bubble,” passing within approximately 2.5 miles of an arriving airplane. “We never got a TA or an RA on the TCAS, or a visual,” Tillman remembers. “But the controller said, ‘Call me when you get on the ground.’ I did, and he said, ‘Sorry, but you had a loss of [required] separation, and the alarm went off, so I have to write you up.’ “The flight director had frozen up again when we were on final into Denver, but we were on a visual, so I just turned it off. We wrote up the flight director, but the technician who checked it said he couldn’t duplicate the problem.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]“The next morning, we flew the same airplane back to Salt Lake City, and the flight director froze up again, so we turned it off. In Salt Lake City, the unit was removed and bench-checked;[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]the technician there conducted more thorough tests and duplicated the problem.”[/FONT]


[FONT=&quot]FAA enforcement action[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The FAA eventually agreed that “during the turn to heading 310, the captain’s flight director…unexpectedly suffered a mechanical malfunction which caused the pitch and roll command bars to freeze,” and that “[a] subsequent bench teardown of the instrument confirmed the presence of defective components in the flight director.” “But the FAA said it didn’t matter,” Tillman continues. “They said the flight director is not a primary instrument, and that we should have caught the heading on the HSI and the wet compass.” On Feb. 25, 2005, the FAA sent Tillman a Notice of Proposed Certificate Action saying that the agency proposed to suspend his ATP certificate. “After I received the FAA’s initial letter of their intent to take certificate action, I called Kevin Fitzpatrick,” an ALPA contract administrator who works closely with the Delta Master Executive Council. “Attorney Karen O’Riordan [who has since left ALPA] took the case. “We asked the FAA for the radar data. They said they didn’t have it. “Karen and I asked for a hearing. On June 23, 2005, we had an informal conference in Seattle with the FAA attorney who was prosecuting the case. He said, ‘We’re willing to drop the suspension to two weeks, but we’re still going to pursue certificate action.’” On July 6, 2005, the FAA’s Northwest Mountain Region sent Tillman a certified[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] letter saying he had “acted contrary to ATC instruction” and “created a loss of [required] separation with another aircraft” when “no emergency existed” and thus violated Federal Aviation Regulation 91.123(b). The FAA suspended all of Tillman’s airman certificates, including his ATP, for 30 days. However, the FAA letter acknowledged that Tillman was “entitled to a waiver of penalty under the Aviation Safety Reporting Program” because he had filed an ASRS report of the incident within 10 days. That meant the FAA would not actually suspend his airman certificates, but the suspension would become part of his record. Another effect of the FAA enforcement action would have been to wipe out Tillman’s ability to obtain a waiver of penalty through the ASRS program for any possible future infraction of the FARs for 5 years.[/FONT]


[FONT=&quot]Radar data[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]“Karen said, ‘We’ll stay with you as long as you want,’” Tillman continues. “I said, ‘Let’s take it to the judge.’ “Our trial was scheduled for June 25, 2006. Karen called and said that the FAA had given us the radar data. She said, ‘We’re going to ask for a continuance.’ The FAA opposed our request for the continuance; they said that we shouldn’t need more than a week to examine the data. But the judge disagreed and granted the continuance. “In the next 60 days, the ATC experts in ALPA’s Engineering and Air Safety Department took apart that radar data and determined that, even if we’d stopped the turn at 310, we’d still have had loss of separation. In their opinion, there had been a controller error.” ALPA staff engineer John Gray, who had recently retired as an air traffic controller at Atlanta Center and had been an airline pilot himself, also realized when examining the radar data that the SLC TRACON controller had failed to follow an explicit FAA procedure: Before clearing Delta Flight 1619 for the climb[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]to FL230, the controller should have momentarily deactivated the altitude filter on his radar scope so as to see the arrival that was at a higher altitude and would present a conflict with Delta 1619 in the climbing turn.[/FONT]


[FONT=&quot]A day in court[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Jay Wells, an experienced senior attorney in ALPA’s Legal Department, took over Tillman’s defense from attorney O’Riordan. Wells went to trial on Aug. 23, 2006, with multiple expert witnesses ready to testify on Tillman’s behalf. Tillman said, “I actually had two charges against me—failure to comply with an ATC clearance, and causing a loss of separation. At the start of the trial, the FAA dropped the loss-of-separation charge, based on what ALPA found in the radar data.” After a short hearing, NTSB Administrative Law Judge Patrick G. Geraghty said, in part, “the issue…is whether or not [Capt. Tillman] was faced with a bona fide emergency not of his own making…. In my view, the evidence does in fact show that there was an emergency, that it was not of [Capt. Tillman’s] own making, that when faced with it, it was reasonably addressed in a reasonable amount of time, 15 to 20 seconds, at the outside….” Judge Geraghty therefore ruled in Tillman’s favor and dismissed the order of suspension with waiver of penalty. Tillman said recently, “Early on, I crucified myself—I thought, ‘I should have caught [the heading overshoot]. Maybe I should just take whatever punishment [the FAA] gives me.’ But when I talked to other people about it, they said, ‘Rusty, you had a malfunction, and you dealt with it the best you could.’ So I’m glad we fought it. “The FAA writes the rules, interprets them, and enforces them—it’s kind of scary. It’s really nice to have ALPA in your corner if you find yourself facing[/FONT][FONT=&quot] FAA certificate action.”[/FONT]

 

[Singlecoil]

I believe that it would always have been IFR for a pt. 121 op. It might have been VMC or IMC, but always IFR.

Yeah, that's an ops spec restriction. We are approved to fly entire VFR legs on three different specific routes in 737's.

 

[CFI2766]

I ment IMC, VMC, but what does 121 have to do with this, did I miss something? We are 121, and have an Op Spec that we could depart in VMC from an untowered airport and pick up a clearance within 50 NM of the departure airport.

No barbs, I was just pointing out that IMC and VMC are different things than IFR or VFR. From the description, it sounded like they were departing an uncontrolled airport after believing that they had received an IFR clearance.

I agree with you, where I think you might be going, in that it would have been a different situation than if they had departed VFR, by definition in VMC, with the intention of picking up an IFR clearance once airborne.

 

[CFI2766]

Yeah, that's an ops spec restriction. We are approved to fly entire VFR legs on three different specific routes in 737's.

That's kinda what I meant. I did a poor job of phrasing. 121 doesn't by definition mean always IFR; rather, I meant that our ops specs generally mean that we are usually IFR, regardless of meterological conditions.