Originally Posted by Fedex999999
If you have ACARS, you won't be calling Clearance Delivery in MEM and a lot of other cities. The clearance comes across the ACARS automatically as a PDC.
But again, I am one of the annoying-congesting the freq- first officers that forgot to ask for the center runway. Oops. Sorry.
Without trying to get technical here, and for the benefit of MEM_ATC who asked the question and who has been extremely helpful in providing insights into the ATC perspective by discussing these things candidly with us...
It is rare that a FedEx airplane will call Clearance Delivery in Memphis. Even airplanes without ACARS can receive their PDC through our computer system which prints the PDC with the Weight & Balance each time the W&B is printed. Of course, the PDC is not available until 30 minutes prior to the scheduled block out time, so it's possible that we won't get a PDC. In that case, we would call Clearance Delivery and use the LOA procedure to recieve our clearance. Even in that case, it's a canned call, and a canned response.
I've given the runway assignment topic a bit of thought, and have an idea that I think might be worthy of discussion and possible pursuit. We all know before pushback if we'll be needing the long runway for departure. Why not include a request or a flag with the pushback call to Ramp Tower, and let Ramp Tower pass the information along to Memphis Ground Control? Or, perhaps even better still, attach that information to the Beacon Call - - I don't know if it matters, but perhaps it could influence the order of beacon/push.
Then, when we get to the Entry/Exit spot, Ground already knows which runway we need, and even if we forget to mention the runway requirement, there's already a flag on our strip to that effect.
Does this idea have any merit?
- The truth only hurts if it should -