rough morning at Caldwell with the blenders

[keith]

2 helicopters in quick succession give Caldwell a run for its money.

On the second clip, there's an edit between him being 2 miles out and then 1 mile out because I was changing some scanner settings at the time ('doh!).  There's also silences and irrelevant calls removed throughout.

Some of the long silences between calls are real time, though, and were left there to show just how confused ppl must've been!

The value of this post is that it shows how important it is to be clear on initial calls with:
- who you are
- where you are
- what you want

In the 2nd pilot's defense, one of the blocks sounded like it was caused by tower when he said something like "what do you want to do?"  As the pilot tried to immediately respond, tower then kept talking. I think he was probably still flustered from the last helicopter which had left about 3 mins earlier.

[KSYR-pjr]

The first clip sounded pretty routine to me without a lot of excitement but the second was definitely more unconventional.  Confusion on both sides of the mike, for sure.

[keith]

Agreed, the first is not too exciting.

[Eugene Zaporozhets]

I love these moments when controllers deal with a tight situation like this, and you can just sense the tension in their voice.

[cmhidinger]

I think the controller was totally unprofessional.  Here in the first clip he makes a big deal about the helo being either "inbound" or "transitioning" yet in the second clip when the helo departs from a position 1-2 miles southeast of the field (presumably inside the delta) he tells him "transition approved".  Uh, if he's in your airspace and dpearts to the southwest, a simple "proceed as requested" would be more correct.  Granted I don't know what else he had going on or how many other aircraft he was talking to but I think he could have handled the situation better.  Every day I deal with pipeline and power line partols without a DBRITE and I completely understand the need for complete and accurate initial calls but a simple, "N12345, say position, altitude and direction of flight"  would have saved a lot of worthless calls.

hd