Originally Posted by
N90-EWR
As a NY Tracon controller, reading some of the misinformation in some of the replies in this thread has been very entertaining, but it also reminds me that very few people actually know just how complex our airspace is. There is a lot of background context that's always missed on situations like this one. I will agree that he could had phrased it differently, but having been myself in similar situations before, I can understand why he reacted that way.
We are in emergency crisis with the staffing situation here. We are working 10 hour shifts, mandatory 6 day workweeks with longer times on combined radar positions, and shorter breaks. Add that to the frustration of watching 1 aircraft deviate way differently than all the previous aircraft just before it, understand that there is a human being behind the screen, not a machine. Sometimes emotions can get even the best of us. He has over 3 decades of experience and is retiring at the end of this year. very cool guy, he's not a douche. Though he didn't do anything wrong from the operational point of view, I'm sure he would probably word it differently if he had a chance to go back in time.
I'm sure that there are other busy places by volume, but I doubt that there is another place in the world with this many high volume airports so close to each other. We many not be the busiest (though we're up there) but we are definitely the most complex. A deviation in other busy places may be not be such a big deal other than extra frequency workload, but here it's very likely to put you in direct conflict with other traffic.
That particular shift we were in swap and GREKI was one of the few fixes that were open to ALL N90 airports, so departures out of EWR, LGA, JFK, HPN, TEB, MMU (those last two go over Brezy first then Greki), plus all other satellites were being launched with timed intervals. When the Air Lingus got up, and turned the wrong way, they missed their gap reference the other departures from the other airports, and he couldn't just drive through LGA airspace with all the traffic that was there already confined tighter because of the weather. We do NOT penalize the aircraft flying their routes for the one that didn't comply. The best option is to do exactly what he did, hold him until another gap that the aircraft can meet becomes available. Our airspace is so tight that we do not have holding patterns within N90 airspace. If we need to hold, we have to issue box pattern vectors like he did. All our holding patterns are on the outter fixes in center airspace.
I could go on a longer and more detailed explanation of why he did what he did move by move, but it would require more time than I'm willing to commit to this.