Change "request taxi to the active"#1647

A previous suggestion to change the terminology “request taxi to the active” has just been rejected by the team for the following reason and then the thread was locked, not allowing any chance for people to respond:

“Phrasology is added based on real life controller feedback - we like realism ourselves, but we’ve added different calls and phrasology to keep things dynamic - this isn’t something we plan on changing at this time. While aviation is strict - humans say all sorts of things on the radio and we like to replicate that where we can”.

I find this reason unacceptable. Allowing incorrect phraseology to “keep things dynamic” is an idiotic reason. If it was something casual, I would understand, but where it is important phraseology that’s there for a good reason, it should be fixed or at least the frequency of its use should be dialled down or limited to the geographic regions where people use it only.

For clarity: ICAO ATC phraseology does not include the specific phrase “request taxi to the active”. While pilots frequently use this informally in some regions, it is not considered standard ICAO terminology for several reasons:
1) Ambiguity of “The Active”: The term “active” is not a formal definition for a runway in ICAO Doc 4444. At many airports, multiple runways may be in use simultaneously, making “the active” ambiguous and potentially confusing.
2) Standard ICAO Phraseology: According to ICAO Doc 4444 (PANS-ATM), the standard phraseology for a pilot requesting taxi instructions is:
[Aircraft Callsign] [Position] REQUEST TAXI [Intentions/Destination].
ATC Response: The controller will typically respond with:
TAXI TO HOLDING POINT [designator] [RUNWAY (number)] VIA [route].

Hey Mark, thank you for your additional feedback - more than happy to have discussions with anyone about a suggestion, the thread was locked as part of an ongoing cleanup effort with Nolt - but I appreciate how that could be seen like we don’t want you to respond, and for that I apologise and I won’t do so on this suggestion.

I fully get the passion you have about this topic, ensuring consistent and correct phraseology is an important part of the ATC experience. With regards to the response, while you may think this is idiotic I was simply trying to be transparent in our thinking and inital approach, while echoing previous discussions in our Discord server and going through the backlog of Nolt suggestions, due to this, maybe I wasn’t as clear as I could be with regards to your suggestion, upon some further discussion with the community in Discord around this topic I am going to take this suggestion back internally, to see if it’s something we can either make more region specific, a toggle, adjust the frequency or outright remove.

I can’t promise anything more at this stage however thank you again for providing a detailed response and it’s taken on board, albeit at the expensive of calling my response idiotic!

Thanks for the response and for taking a 2nd look at it. I certainly understand the desire to keep things dynamic, but I don’t think that should include not following the rules (unless the rules are not followed in real life). Regional variation might be the way to go here. I’m not an expert on all countries, but from what I’ve heard “the active” is not used in the UK or Germany at least, and I believe most of Europe. Might be worth asking around pilots from different countries.

FYI - ‘..the active’ has not been used in the US since probably the 80’s. It’s not recognised in the FAA manual either.