Vipero - indeed I have a great deal of sympathy for dispatchers and ops bods, but especially for the little guys who don't have an ops that is trained for and used to flight planning inn Europe; can you imagine trying to produce an accurate flight plan across Europe with only Jeppesen charts and the RAD document?
Having said that, a fair number of those very same ops bods have a tendency to offload what is really their responsibility onto IFPS, and then to bitch about the service 'provided'. IFPS does routing assistance as a favour, not as a mandate, which is why the level of accustomed service can decline a bit when thigns go nipples north.
Also, think about what things would be like without Flexible Use of Airspace, and IFPS. I don't know the figures off the top of my head, but the increase in capacity within European airspace has been substantial; only to be matched by an equivalent increase in the number of flights operating in that same airspace.....
SiP - Generally things run relatively calmly, as we have a substantial iron brain that processes the large majority of messages fully automatically; roughly 86% of 30,000 flights per day in FP1 at the moment. When things do go wrong for whatever reason, then generally the IFPS staff get on with things to the best of their ability.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think IFPS is perfect, nor is the service fully consistent with regard manual processing by the staff, but it's one helluva lot better than what went before (I know - I worked in Heathrow FBU), plus it provides ATC with much better quality data on flights coming their way.
By the way Vipero, NATS is not one of ours - you'll have to point that one at the UK
