Originally Posted by
Neo380
What a truly pathetic list of excuses.
So '127 qualified trainees would have made no difference to the current staffing shortage', etc. Really?!
I am am not familiar with the Gatwick situation but I can very well compare staff shortages, complexity of work positions , ability to accept trainees on OJT and training failures rates. which are similar to my old Centre environment. And then the points made by Flight master are all relevant.
A few facts of life in ATC.
1- the more complex the traffic situation , the longer it takes to validate and the higher the failure rate will be. .
2- The longer it takes to validate the more OJT ( e.g. Coaching on live traffic) you will need. and there are only so much positions you can put a trainee on.
3- More trainees arriving in one go mean less training time OJT for each , =even longer training times and more demand on available coaches.
4- if your departure rate exceed trainees income, you will have people just finished validating being promoted to coaches themselves to train the new arriving trainees, This leads to dilution of expertise.
This is a perfect vicious circle if your ability to train new people to replace departures and the raise of traffic has not been planned correctly many years before. Cancelling 127 trainees ( and I wonder how many of those 127 were planned for Gatwick) was indeed a mistake in hindsight., Even more so since the traffic rebounded to post 2019 levels in almost one go,, which was definitively not what was expected in 2020. Hindsight is a wonderful thing to apportion blame.
One thing could really help : a complete redesigning of the airspace to be it more simple to operate , to make training easier and faster.
Finally this is not a UK thing ,almost everybody operating complex ATC systems is in the same situation . in Europe the German DFS is one of them , and the US/FAA at its large complex facilities. Look at the staff shortage and failure rate in New York ARTCC , Towers and Tracon .