Comments

I am a center controller and am disturbed by the "wives tale" that controllers are all knowing and more importantly toooo busy to serve our users. I understand why one would rather go VFR everytime i.e. crazy routes and vectors all over the place, bad altitudes and most importantly "big brother" tracking your every move, just waiting to ruin ones flying life. The fact is all of this can be avoided a majority of the time. First we have two basic types of controllers these days. First the veterans who were trained on outdated equipment and tons of rules to make up for the poor equipment. Now the are rather jaded and lack empathy or the desire to adapt to our newer, much better equipment, so they work the same old way. On top of this less than 1 percent of them fly there own plane. Basically they have very little knowledge of what pilots actually want, need, require or desire. 99 percent of them think if you ask for a shortcut its because your greedy and you should just be happy they are "saving your life" by saying "blah blah center roger, blah blah altimeter 3006" then 5 minutes later saying "N1234 contact blah blah aproach/center on blah blah". Second are the new controllers that are trained by these people to do the same thing. Not to say there aren't some really good controllers out there, but they are few, trust me. By good I mean going above and beyond to make things happen for our customers ( this is what I call pilots ) most call them "users". All that being said, my advice is to Demand what you need and even want. Pilots ask for things because the request will make them more comfortable...right? Maybe to save fuel or get out of the couds or to get to smoother air or to fly an approach your more comfortable/familure with or to get to your destination faster. All this is a safety factor. By my view the faster you get to your destination, the less chance you have to encounter a problem. Hey you got plenty of fuel for your flight and tons of money laying around, but you want to go direct instead of some convoluted routing you thought you should file to not make the FAA mad at you or some routing you were given by a controller...maybe when you get to your destination the good wx went bad, you shot an approach but go missed you then climb back up to get over our MVA, MEA or whatever else we call em and get vectored all over for another shot. Then you go missed again and you bail to your alternate, but the winds are higher than forcast and now your bingo fuel.... That shortcut sure seems completely necessary now.... Guess what all I had to do to get that shortcut is say "cleared direct" or worse case press a button and call the next controller to sell them the idea... No big deal. Want to go VFR in the mountains? Thats cool just key up and say you want flight following and when your in terrain just say yo center this is N1234 whats the MEA the next 100 miles? Problem solved. Ask me some good questions because its time pilots and controllers are on the same page.