I find it interesting to see that in the US they dumped the electronic coordination because it increased workload and did not give the expected capacity increase and replaced the "support controller's" screen with a large paper flight strip board in order for that controller to spot conflicts and perform the coordination function now carried out by our CSC's. Please note everybody that the PFS display is in front of the non radar controller, not like NERC. The US are now looking at conflict probing tools in order to rid themselves of PFS. At NERC there is no medium term conflict detection to assist planners. There should be, according to the original specification, but it was quietly dropped when the boffins said "too difficult".
There are a number of people on this thread who are claiming that what we have must be what we want because it was designed by ATCO's. The problem is that there was an awful lot of "you can't change that without a safety arguement" because the project was driven by accountants. I know that there has now been a huge overspend, but believe me, when 1996 was the anticipated opening date, anything which cost anything was banned by the bean counters.
The other problem is that the original team of ATCO's who got together to define MMI and procedures have now returned to operational duties, where they have had little influence over the direction of the project.
Z
