R in a Circle (Airport Surveillance Radar) on VFR charts

"Teacherjh" wrote in message
...

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


Where there's an (r) at a nearby airport you find ASR services.



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?


No.