Upon touching down while still rolling, tower gives us taxi instructions back to parking. I understand the need to give instructions on where to exit the runway but I’m wondering if the FULL taxi instructions must be read back or only the taxi way we are exiting on is necessary. I find it difficult for student pilots to be landing an aircraft and focused on maintaining aircraft control while tower is giving them a long read back taxi clearance that warrants head down activity while still on the active runway. Is it “legal” to wait till clearing the runway and receiving those same instructions from ground when the aircraft at a full stop? For example tower will say “right on Foxtrot taxi to parking via DSE CROSS RWY 5” Is repeating back “right on Foxtrot” permitted? Thank you.
1 Answer
As soon as you're able—meaning once you've slowed to taxi speed, at the very latest—you should read back the runway exit instruction. Technically you don't have to read that back, you just have to perform the action, assuming of course that it's a reasonable place for you to exit. But if you don't read it back the controller will be in your ear giving the instruction again to make sure you heard it.
It's great if you can comprehend and read back a long taxi instruction like that, but it's understandable if you can't—especially for student pilots. SO if all you got was the exit point, you can read that back on its own, or you can toss in a little extra verbiage:
Right on Foxtrot and say again the rest, N345.
Right on Foxtrot, standby, N345.
Something like that is perfectly understandable and common, even for professional airline pilots. The important thing is to get off the runway without dawdling; everything else can wait a second or three.
