AFR has an article today.
perhaps this link will work
Air traffic control ‘staff breaks’ cause flight chaos, airline anger
by Kylar Loussikian, Deputy editor - Business.
Airspace in the busy route between Brisbane and Sydney was abruptly left without air traffic services twice on Tuesday, limiting the number of flights and causing a raft of cancellations at the height of the holiday travel period.
There have been 26 periods that air traffic services have been interrupted in the last fortnight, and 334 in total over the last year. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the aviation sector, this did not occur at all.
One of my former colleagues posted
I think the majority of people that have worked in the industry know exactly how this issue has come about. It is a very sad indictment for the professional ATC’s, that have had to prop up the system for so many years, now are purported to be the front line of the problem.
I think if you were to look at cronyism in management and the decisions made over the last couple of years at the Authority the issue at hand and the ongoing ramifications would be quite clear. Obviously lots of Teflon suits have been the order of the day.
The AFR article gets close to discussing short staffing as the root cause. A more thorough probe would be asking who/why was the short staffing initiated, what are the fatigue related risks with staff working massive amounts of overtime, and why the recruitment of ATCs is stop/start. Management decisions to rely on 457 Visas also play a part in this ATC shortage.
Sunny, do those figures for service interruptions in the last fortnight look correct? 26 seems high!