I had not flown all year until today. Luckily it was a nice cool and sunny day so I headed out breaking my 36 hours of non flight. On the way out, I did not recognize the tower controller's voice. I surmised it must be a new one. I had to wait for the oil to warm and was not in a hurry so I was watching him work as I sat letting everything come to operating temperature.
I could tell he was in trouble and not making any progress correcting things. Nothing was dangerous but our airport is busy and it usually runs very efficiently. He seemed to be making the rookie mistake of building extra space. The rookie thinks this buys him some time but what it really does is kick the can down the road and he will have to reckon with his problems sooner than later.
At a place that's not very busy, this can work as you often have gaps with no traffic and things then reset themselves but when it is continuously busy, the delay you introduced 10 minutes ago is still haunting you 10 minutes later. I did have a bit of a delay departiing but once I was on my way, it was no longer my problem.
I say that but I had to come back home eventually. Eventually was about an hour later. I had hoped things would have cleaned up but they had not. I called in at 12 miles and was told to call in at 8. At 8 I called in and he asked me to do a 360 degree turn. This again is a delaying tactic, he still had to sequence me but this made me go away for 2 minutes. I called back inbound and he requested a 3 mile call. Typically controllers will request the 2-3 mile reminder. These 3 reminders were using frequency time and indicating that he hadn't built the mental picture of how he would sequence me.
As I approached 3 miles, I was watching the other traffic in the pattern. I had slowed down to 125 which is around my minimum safe speed that far out. I was on a right base and he had pushed a trainer farther downwind and then dropped him in front of me. When I called 3 miles, he told me to follow the trainer. I asked if I could do S turns as I was 65 knots faster. We were under a mile apart but I let him figure that part out.
The controller doing the training stepped in and said I could go through final for spacing and then the new controller gave the plane ahead of me a 360. While all this is happening their is another plane on downwind that was soon gonna be a big problem. This is why all this kicking the can down the street is a bad idea. The interesting thing was that I had seen this coming 8 miles out but they have to learn.
The training controller then stepped in again to fix it all. He cleared me direct to the numbers, put the plane ahead of me, behind me and then got the guy on downwind sorted. While passing on final is not normal, it made sense in this case. I would be at the runway in <1.5 minutes and the guy I was passing would take over 3 minutes. This solution allowed me to land, and created a gap to launch a departing aircraft. I made an acceptable arrival and cleared the runway as the departure squeezed out behind me.
