matthew_w100 wrote:I did the M40j2/Burnham/Ascot route the other day. I was cleared unambiguously, with a VERY unambiguous clearance limit of Ascot Racecourse. Being naive I was expecting an onward clearance before I got there, but heard nothing. So as I approached I made a position call. And was told to "call Farnborough, goodbye". So now what am I supposed to do? Orbit in Heathrow's zone till I can find a gap in Farnborough's radio transmissions? Carry on towards Woking, and call F'boro as soon as I can? As far as I was concerned, I'm now in controlled airspace without a clearance, and the infringement course is beckoning.
Interesting ... and not very helpful from Heathrow.
Although you were still in CAS, you had been given a clearance, so although they had told you to contact F'boro, you were not infringing their CAS. Just like when Approach tell you to contact Tower you remain clear in the CAS you're in. Of course, in this case you were then going to another part of CAS with a different controlling entity. If you did not manage to get a call in and clearance from F'boro you would strictly speaking need to go back to LHR and ask for an orbit (assuming you were given Radar control and not an 'own navigation not above' service, in which case you could orbit to your heart's content). All rather messy and involving lots of knobs.
Apart from the lesson that LHR doesn't seem fully aware of airspace around them, the lesson for us as pilots should be that we need to explicitly ask LHR to either negotiate a clearance and/or handover with F'boro in this case, and to ask for that sooner rather than later, preferably as part of the first request for transit (not just at LHR/F'boro but also at other similar setups).
Alternatively, you could have replied to the LHR hand-off with "negative, I need clearance from F'boro" and sort of try to make it their problem that you cannot exit their CAS... but at that stage it's too late and things are messy already.
What happened on your actual flight?
We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.