ATC Question - Northbound Routings over East Anglia - 1990
Folks,
This may seem a deeply obscure question, but the background is as follows:-
In the late-'80s, there were severe capacity problems in the Daventry Sector of UK airspace, causing delays particularly for UK domestic traffic. I used the Teesside-London service intensively at this time, so had first-hand experience of this.
As a partial solution, northbound Teesside (BMA), Aberdeen, and Newcastle services (the latter two being BA) were routed out towards Clacton VOR northbound, then given radar control by Eastern Radar up to around Ottringham. This was pretty radical stuff for the time, as East Anglia was firmly military country, apart from origin/destination civil stuff, and the odd overflight such as East Midlands-Amsterdam.
I'd love to know how much resistance the military put up to this, what their reservations were, and how it actually worked in practice.. There was never any pattern to which flights would be flight planned up that way, and the first I used to know about it was the different SID out of Heathrow. There never seemed to be a huge amount of vectoring around traffic (as someone who listened to the Eastern frequencies told me (allegedly)) , proving that it was actually a jolly good idea, and a logical use of airspace.
For those who can't remember, the military controlled most of the airspace roughly east of the M1 and west of the M6, and the Daventry Sector was mightily busy.
I've seen a photo of an intercept of a BA 757 by Tornados which was captioned as a "celebration" (!) of the success of system a couple of years after it started.
Any recollections from ATC professionals would be welcomed.