If you can taxi in Moorabbin Airport, you can taxi anywhere else

When we first arrived here before we started flying, they told us Moorabbin Airport has 5 runways and a very complicated layout.

One lady told us,

“If you can taxi in Moorabbin Airport, you can taxi in any other airport in the world!”

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But it is indeed true that despite all the advances in technology in yesteryears, one of the things which might seem primitive in comparison is the way we taxi on the ground and avoid collision with other aircrafts.

Basically, we use a map of the runways and taxiways at the aerodrome, and wait for clearance to be given by the Ground Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) to taxi back to the apron, or cross active runways.

This seems easy enough, but in practice, it can be annoying especially when you’re unfamiliar with the airport. You’ll struggle to figure out what taxiway you’re on, and then when given clearance by ATC, sometimes you may also struggle with the instructions given to you!

Something like..

“Echo Oscar Kilo on Taxiway A6, taxi via Foxtrot, cross Runway 22, go via Bravo, cross Runway 17R, taxi via Alpha back to apron.”

And mind you, all those clearances have to be read back to them!

If you can’t read back all those instructions because you’re too confused, your response will probably be something like..

“Err.. Echo Oscar Kilo.. Uh.. Say again?”

If it was your first time landing at that airport, you better wish you have a full crop of hair on your head cos you’ll be scratching it till you’re bald.

Here’s a look at the layout of Moorabbin Aerodome.

And here’s how it looks like in the air.

In comparison, let’s take a look at another aerodrome, one which I will fly to once I start my navigation phase.

See the difference?

Well, since we train at Moorabbin, we eventually got used to the layout. But that lady who made that bold claim at the start of this post was right to a certain extent. If you’ve always been training at a much more complicated aerodrome and have gotten used to it, simpler layouts of other aerodromes should theoretically not pose you much problems at all, no?

At the end of the day, as with everything, the more you do something, the more you get used to it, the better you become.

That’s such a cliché.