"Refusing to Handle You"

--------------------
Richard Kaplan

www.flyimc.com

"A Lieberman" wrote in message

If the heavy iron pilots says unable and follows up by declaring an
emergency and squawking 7700, then there must be some substance to my
position.

Note that in the report you mention it is ATC that mentioned pilot emergency
authority. That sounds to me as if the controller did it to cover himself
when he realized he should not have given the pilot the clearance through
the restricted area. Note that the airline pilot did precisely what I have
suggested -- he told ATC he was "Unable" to accept the new clearance.


To override an ATC directive (or in this case "non directive"), I'd
suspect
a plan of action would be needed and rather quickly if ATC has not offered
a second option (which sounds like what happened in Mikes case).

The biggest problem I see here is the implication of the urgency with which
the controller wanted the pilot to accept the reroute or propose an
alternate plan.... no dice. That is the controller's problem unless he
provided a very good reason for the urgent change, i.e. some major radar
outage or national security event or something similar. In a situation as
described, the pilot has every right to think through his options and get a
new weather briefing and whatever other information is necessary to decide
if a re-route is safe before accepting a new clearance -- indeed, the FARs
REQUIRE the pilot to be aware of "all available information" for the planned
route of flight. Absent some national security emergency, there is no
reason to rush into accepting a revised clearance through weather -- and
"Potomac will not accept you" is NOT a national security emergency.

If Mikes situation happened to me, and I do have storm scope in my plane,
and I knew there was bad weather behind me, I will not hesitate to declare
an emergency

Again... no emergency declaration is necesary on the pilot's part... just
the magic word "Unable" or perhaps "Unable reroute into convective weather."