Today marks the end of ATC Instruction “Taxi to . . .”
The Us Department of Transportation in a FAA Air Traffic Organisation policy has decreed that from today, June 30th, 2010 that the instruction “Taxi to . . . “ is to be abolished. Apparently this phrase virtually meant that once issued to a pilot, the aircraft could taxi to the assigned take-off runway and cross all runways and taxiways without further authority.
This was felt to be a safety issue and ATC instructions in future must give specific instructions for each runway crossing and the instruction will not be given until an aircraft has cleared a previous runway crossing.
So a new instruction could sound something like this: “Cross Runway Two Eight Left and hold short of Runway two eight right”
Authorising the aircraft to taxi to the take off runway could sound like this: “Runway Three Six Left via taxiway Alpha, hold short of Runway Two Seven Right”.
More details here
Wonder when we’ll see this in FSX??
alot of VATSIM controllers do this already