Not Long Now We already have a comparison of complexity and workload in Area units. Each sector has a sector capacity which has been refined over years. That figure is not plucked out of thin air but is the one which is a very strong guide to just how much traffic the sector can take safely. More than 80% (the TSF figure) means we seriously consider regulation which is exactly what NATS and the customers want to avoid and the Regulator wants to penalise. Those figures take into account everything which contributes to "being busy" i.e. short or long time on frequency, the equipment you use, the traffic climb and descent profiles, the conflictions in traffic patterns, the types of service you give etc. They may not be mentioned in any set up manual but all those factors combine to give you an actual sector capacity.
No matter how good an ATCO you may be I defy you to handle much more than the TSF safely. That is the practical measure of how much each valid ATCO can work on all the sectors.
Each and every day those sectors have a reasonably accurate traffic demand and load figure for every hour of the day.
It doesn't take a genius to extract those figures from the archive and average them per hour over a year and give a percentage of actual traffic load against TSF.
That average will balance out the weekday / weekend / summer / winter / Oceanic track position etc and give you an each sector an average occupancy based on the same rationale.
You can average out the occupancy against the WPP sector opening times and take the realistic bandbox configuartion because no ATCO sits at night with a sector which is not forecast to have any traffic.
That is a fair way of measuring workload because it is how we man our sectors. When I suggested that to the BEC "expert" on the model construction he said they had not thought to use such practical data.
It might not solve all the problems but it will go a long way to giving us all some confidence the comparisons are valid.
