Merry Go Round Continues
The entire Qatar ANS / AND is a joke at best, a massive risk at worse with zero mitigation.
Bahrain and the UAE are vehemently opposing the QFIR as they know QCAA is not qualified to manage an FIR. The veneer of the QCAA ANS being a well managed organisational system is wearing off very very quickly. Incompetence, mistruths and misdirection that used to seem to work in the past, is not working anymore.
There is now on average a 160 losses of wake turbulence on final approach a month between Heavy & Heavy and about 140 between Heavy & Medium. Roughly 20 % average of all acft on final into Hamad International Airport are vectored below wake sep with nothing being done. That is just HIA final. Doha International Airport and Al Udeid are a separate matter entirely and exponentially increase those numbers. In Feb / March 2022, at least a 145 sep losses on departure by Tower with less than 4nm between them which obviously translates to a Radar separation loss as well in most cases. Bare in mind, as I stated before, “Hold for release” is not allowed under any circumstances and if it happens, pretty much encourages an “investigation” !? Some as low as 2nm between H & H. IF, and that is a big IF, dependent on nationality, when the occasional investigation does happen, it’s cursory in the case of certain individuals and damning in the case of others. Yet, none of this info was / is shared either with the regulator or IBG.
There has been a direct threatening of certain staff members in the last 18 months with employment services termination if they dared to leak details of one or any of certain very severe incidents. It’s pretty much an open secret amongst all staff members.
In the TMA alone there are on average 10 technical losses of separation a week going un-investigated, often at times despite reports from airlines involved.
The Safety Dept is no doubt withholding info from the IBG safety manager as there seems to be zero rehabilitative or corrective training happening. The only way to gauge if in fact information IS being shared, is the result of that sharing. There seems to now be no doubt that intentional concealment of facts as they definitely did not want IBG to obtain access to this data for fear of the response they will receive in the form of recommendations . IBG I am certain has now for some time suspected a break down in information sharing, but thus far has been unable to confirm. Bare in mind, this type of concealment does NOT happen at low level management (safety / compliance) without approval / instigation or in some cases, insistence from more senior levels of management.
Many a time QCAA ANS has somehow in the past been able to “wing” it and survive. That survival almost always was played as a “huge success”. Of course, that was never the case.
The category of this media page / site is rarely paid attention to. Often it’s one of two things that govern that, one being to ignore and just hope to hell that nothing goes wrong and two, most commentary is viewed as that of an aggrieved party. This is not entirely unexpected. There does seem to however be a difference this time as I’m lead to believe that numerous communications have out of desperation been sent to international organisation’s that govern ATM safety and practices, including those of the Middle East. All from individuals within the employ of QCAA. The interesting part is that it was NOT the World Cup that drove those communications, but base levels of concern for safety practices and continued intentional comprising of safety standards, ineptitude of management and incorrect employment methodology. A major incident (aside from the potential monumental tragedy) can and will prove hugely embarrassing to all concerned as pretty much everything raised as concerns in this thread has now for well over 30 odd months been communicated to these organisations.