I disagree...it is cut and dry. To clarify, I am basing my view off real world...not VATSIM. I don't know the particulars of VATSIM controlling.

I understand and agree that the responsibility, by the book, will be yours until the aircraft gets fully inside the handoff receiving sector. However, I will still maintain that if you are controlling an aircraft in an area where the stratum is unknown, you should not be controlling that aircraft.

I don't know about other facilities, but my facility has some piss-poor controller maps at some sectors. There are times where I might want to be talking to/have radar on an aircraft in a spot where the controller map doesn't give enough info. So I looked up the relevant SOPs/LOAs. There are other times where I have decided that, I don't need to know and when a situation like you pose arises, I do a handoff to the first low sector all the time.

Not to mention, in the area I work and the surrounding sectors I interact with, saying, "hey...can you take care of any subsequent point outs this aircraft might need?" often would not go over so smoothly with that controller. We do have some LOAs that actually require it but beyond that, I would never automatically expect the response to be a simple "wilco." I would much rather just change the plan and execute a handoff.

Let me pose a scenario...

Let's say you are working an aircraft that is in your climbing scenario. Now they lose pressurization and they start an emergency descent. What are you now doing? Calling the other sectors and trying to explain you need them to do point outs to airspace you don't know about? Knowing how QA can be sticklers on some things, I would venture a guess they might be asking you why you felt the need to work an aircraft where you don't know the airspace.

Hopefully this isn't straying too far from the intended topic, but this is the kind of discussions/disagreements that happen on the floor and there will always be a controller who disagrees with how another controller works.

It's important to understand that you are responsible for any coordination needed with further sectors during a point out.  So if you have a boundary runner and you point him out to Sector A and hand him off to Sector B but later on the aircraft gets to Sector C without being more than 2.5 miles from Sector A then you are responsible for that even if it's 100 miles away and don't even know the sector exists.  There is no requirement for Sector A to do the point out even though common sense would tell Sector A that you're not going to do the point out.

Excuse the crappy Paint drawing below but I want to make sure I understand you correctly.



Is what you are trying to say is it is your responsibility for you to ensure that point out is made with sector C, that is 100 miles away? Because no, that's sector B's responsibility as the sector that has control of that aircraft to ensure a point out 100 miles down the road is completed. If you point it out to both sectors A and B and you're being a fool by working an aircraft 100 miles beyond your sector boundary, then yeah, that's on you.