This past weekend, I was flying a series of 3 sectors within Korea. We were half way through the second leg when we noticed that we’re fast approaching our Top of Descent without a descent clearance. The captain, who was the PM, requested a descent.
The ATC replied “KAir xxxx. Descend FL160. I gave you your descent instruction 20 miles ago.”
Well, we never received one, but, okay? We didn’t have time to argue. We gotta get down soon. I set the MCP Altitude and pressed Alt & Spd Intv buttons, followed by an increase of the IAS to expedite our descend.
All of the sudden the ATC gives us traffic information, to which we replied “negative contact: We’re in IMC.” We had the traffic on our TCAS and we increased our rate of descent to increase our safety buffer. It’s rare to receive traffic info in this corridor of airspace, because the inbound and outbound traffic into Seoul are laterally separated by different airways.
And what the ATC said next is something I’ll never forget.
“KAir xxxx, not following our instruction promptly is considered a pilot deviation and we will be filing a report”
WTF? The captain asked what he meant, to which he tried to reply and stopped.
There was a moment of silence over the frequency and he then handed us off to the approach controller.
Captain asked one more time, but there was no reply.
We contacted the approach controller and since we were in busy Seoul TCA, we decided to not let it snowball us and instead deal with it on the ground.
After ramp-in, the captain asked the ground controller for the phone number for the Daegu ACC.
He called and was able to chat with the manager overseeing the ACC controllers.
The manager was on duty at the time, and turns out what happened was that the controller forgot to give us a descent clearance and instead gave our preceding aircraft a “descent to reach” clearance for a waypoint that was not a part of our route. He thought we were that aircraft and thought we violated both lateral & vertical clearance. The traffic information was given out because we were in a converging course with another aircraft. Thankfully we were able to avoid it with a big margin. The manager said he’ll once again replay the recording and get back to us if there’s anything we should know. A few minutes after the phone call, the controller in question called us and apologized for his mistake. We decided not to file a complaint but no doubt, it was an unpleasant experience.
We’re very lucky this happened in Korea. If an incident like this were to happen in China, they’d withhold the recording and claim that we’re making a false claim (this actually happened before). Since our CVR only records the last 2 hours of conversation, which is only available after an accident, we’d have no proof and we’d be at the merci of the ATC recording which may/may not be available to us.
While I had no doubt we didn’t violate anything, the 50 min or so painstakingly reviewing our flight was quite stressful. Our company has a very punitive system for ATC violations and there were so many things going through my mind during that time.
I’m definitely happy that we were flying in a “civilized” part of the world where there is an oversight over the ATC. Still, a big majority of the world’s airspace isn’t owned and operated by democratic nations and they can withhold information in the interest of “national security.” I hope this changes soon in the future, as the world moves onto a more fair system. I hope also, that our company departs from its punitive system, but a rather solution-oriented system.
Thankfully I’ll be getting my full pay this month haha.
skysanai 