How to delay 100s of people and really 'work' a Controller - Birmingham CTR

At sometime in the past year or so, have you been a passenger on a commercial flight coming into a UK airport with a CTR? What do you feel like when you have tight travel connections to make, everything looks good. and you suddenly realise at the last minute that the aircraft is not going to land on time? Even if you haven't travel connections, it's bad enough, you just want to land and get home.

What you don't need is controllers working at an unnecessarily high (unplanned) workload sequencing your flight inbound - they can work like that if they have to, that's in the training and skill, but because your safety is the priority in such situations, it all translates to 'delays' for you. The same applies to departures - and of course, it's not just you and the numbers on your flight, if your aircraft is on short-haul routes, its utilisation that day will be high. The people on its last flight of the day might have an unexpected extra night away due to the 'knock on' effects. And I haven't mentioned extra fuel wastage and costs.

Just think, if the pilot on this infringement had been using a Birmingham 'listening squawk' of 0010 and listening out on 118.050 MHz, then this incident would have been over in the first few seconds of the clip, (although the clip would never have been needed), saving all the trouble, follow up, etc. but instead, we've got one light aircraft, one CTR infringement - it's no disaster movie in the conventional sense, but for 100s of passengers, it was, but thanks to controller skill, but only in a 'delay' sense.