EAA AirVenture

bdl wrote:
On Aug 4, 10:03 am, "Steven P. McNicoll"
wrote:

For those that fly IFR to AirVenture, how did the service this year
compare to prior years?


I thought it was great. Flew up Sunday, flew back Wednesday
afternoon. I was a little worried about having to file to DLL, as
that was further west than I needed to go, but I got a turn south just
east of Madison, which was pretty close to the direct path.


The airspace in the OSH/FLD/SBM area at and below 13,000' was transferred
from Chicago ARTCC to Milwaukee TRACON last February. I wanted to compare
user's experiences with the change. MKE certainly had problems with it.
The Letter of Agreement between Green Bay and Milwaukee TRACONs during
AirVenture had ATW arrivals over FAH at 7000' and GRB arrivals over FAH at
10,000'. Chicago ARTCC ended up leaving them both at 14,000', pointing them
out to Minneapolis ARTCC and giving them to GRB to work down. The LoA had
all ATW departures that would enter MKE airspace on a 130 heading, all MTW
departures on a 220 heading, and all GRB departures and all overflights on a
180 heading between CHING and CLINS. To avoid subjecting users to that form
of ATC abuse GRB rerouted most of the departure and overflight traffic
around or over MKE approach airspace. ZAU did the same with arrivals.



That being said, I didn't have many problems in previous years. One
thing I noticed was there seemed to be a lot of pilots requesting VFR
advisories and being turned down. More than I had heard on previous
years (from my recollection). I know the NOTAM said no VFR advisories
within 150 miles or whatever, but was there some sort of rule
forbidding a controller from accepting VFR advisories, even on a
workload permitting basis? I got the impression (hard to tell from
just voice inflection) that several controllers wanted to issue radar
advisories, but were being restricted from.


If there was anything sort of "rule" like that it was an internal MKE rule.
I'm a controller at GRB, I denied advisories to a few aircraft but they were
all well within MKE approach airspace and were never going to be in mine. I
just told them who they could call and about where they should call once
leaving MKE approach airspace.