AdamFrisch wrote:Yeah, but it's because we handle soo much traffic, we can't deal with the small stuff". Bullshit. JFK, Harstfield-Jackson, LAX, O'Hare all deal with a ton more traffic than Heathrow does on a daily basis, yet they'll accept VFR daily. They just don't want to.
Heathrow just doesn't have spare runway capacity to handle anything other than Jet performance aircraft. And realistically you can fly into Manchester and Gatwick (just expensive).
I suspect one of the core reasons is that airplanes are much 'smaller' in the US (in that they can fly much closer together) than the UK. This is particularly true of VFR vs IFR. The UK seem to have an effective requirement to provide full IFR separation between any TCAS aircraft on a Deconfliction Service and all other (including VFR) traffic and don't seem to be allowed to use visual separation.
On landing capacity, Newark runs about 80% the volume of Heathrow off two closely spaced runways, but allows mixed mode and has a crossing runway on which they allow stub operations - giving them more capacity and the ability to mix different traffic types. And finally, LAHSO and intersecting runway operations are common in the US but (at least for LAHSO) virtually unheard of over here.
As to TMZ's, the US has massive ones around every Class B airport and mandatory encoder checks, so the US ATC has a lot more confidence that everything in or near their airspace is visible with an accurate altitude, this lead to a much more sensible approach to infringements (i.e. not closing a 150 cubic mile block of airspace around any infringer) (I think from previous posts, the UK attempts to provide a 100 cubic mile bubble around each TCAS IFR aircraft requesting deconfliction and any non participating traffic)
Overall, I think the claim Europe/The UK is geographically challenged vs the US metro areas is not true. However, the challenges of limited runway capacity, more restrictive regulations, a more fearful/blame oriented approach to controller management, and a general can't do vs can do are at the route of why the systems feel different