luckyb52 wrote:Thank you all for your much-considered advice, I appreciate it. I think the best strategy (when inside Class D space) is to give the airport a wide berth, then, as Jan Lueders suggested, ask Approach for a frequency change to the tower. Does that violate any rules?
Have some confidence in your knowledge of airspace. Based on what you've described, you'd be in Class E throughout the entire exchange before calling tower. There's zero ambiguity or cause for concern there.
What is less well know is that ATC is responsible for coordinating your transition through any Class D airspace while you're receiving radar services, so you could even enter the Class D prior to the handoff to tower, although if you haven't been sent to the tower by the time you're entering the Delta, it's likely that something is amiss, and I would prompt them all the same. It's one thing to assume a transition through airspace has been coordinated for an overflight, in which case you don't expect to be handed to the tower at all, but in cases where you're approaching the arrival airport and haven't received a handoff to the tower prior to entering the Delta, it's highly unlikely that the controller is intentionally delaying it and is more likely busy with other tasks and has fallen behind on the need to have you change frequencies. This is one of the few limitations of PilotEdge and one of the cases where we don't consistently match up with real world procedures simply as a result of the staffing configuration and vast amount of airspace being covered.
Thankfully, the solution DOES match what you would do in the real world which is politely nudge the approach controller.
In fact, as I think of it, this does happen on a daily basis in the real world. Listen to a busy final approach controller and you'll routinely hear airline pilots saying, "over to tower for United 123?"
