Reply #42: You seem to be operating under a gross misconception. [View All]

[MercutioATC]

The biggest post-9/11 change to ATC wasn't procedure, but awareness. Cessnas flew off course all of the time in the DC area pre-9/11 and the conventional wisdom was that private pilots in small planes frequently have very little experience so it was no big deal. Even professional pilots in commercial airliners occasionally miss a frequency change or stray off course (when you're working over 3 million planes a year as my facility does, even a very small percentage of errors creates a significant number of individual incidents).

We used to treat those incidents as very low-priority items because we'd seen them hundreds of times before with no adverse effects. Obviously, since 9/11, that's changed.

THAT'S the change...not who we "warn" (which, incidentally, hasn't changed).