Where you don't find ASR you don't find ASR services.

At airports without the (R) you don't tend to not find ASR. Not if there's an
(R) at another airport nearby.


Are you sure you're a pilot? Most PEOPLE in western nations have a better
understanding of radar than you exhibit.


Sure I understand RADAR. Some big bloke shouts "MARCO" and the sound bounces
off the N-numbers on my plane. Those numbers travel to all the AM radio
antennas, and the one who's call sign matches the numbers reports back to the
tower. A big computer in the tower figures out my N-number from which stations
are receiving the echo, and puts that number on the wide screen TV up in the
tower, superimposed on the football game.

Whenever there's a touchdown, the tower calls ground control and reads off the
numbers on the TV screen to figure out which airplane landed. Ground control
writes these numbers down on a piece of paper and puts it on the taxiway
diagram. The paper has to be long and narrow in order to fit, which is why
they call it a strip.

If ground control puts the strip on the wrong taxiway, or the pilot takes a
wrong turn, they have to find the strip and correlate it with the N-numbers on
the plane. This is called a strip search. But there is ground radar also,
which makes it easier to find the pilot than to find the strip. Usually the
problem occurs at night at large airports, where from the height of a spam can
the taxiways look like a sea of blue lights. Pilots can taxi so long they have
been known to faint from starvation, so I've learned to bring a sandwich when I
fly into those places. This is called a blue light special.

Now, tell me if I got this right. If a pilot calls in to an area with the (R),
but he's passed that area before half an hour ago so it's not his first time,
there should be a strip on him, and the controllers do the strip search thing.
But since he left the area and came back, the strip expired and was discarded.
They hire a detective (because nobody wants an errant pilot in the skys) but
when they can't find the information, they radio the pilot saying "No strip
Sherlock".

At that point, the airplane falls out of the sky because there's no RADAR to
hold it up. The pilot looks for a field, finds one with horses, waits for the
shout of MARCO and replies POLO as he dives into the game.

Am I close?

Jose

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