Well, iīm not going to answer to the insulting posts (afortunately, not all of you, thank you), but just make a couple of comments that really annoyed me:
1.- One has said that we give priority to spanish pilots because their companies give us special conditions in the flightdeck. This is absolutely FALSE. Itīs a fact that spanish companies give us the worst treatment of all. We have much better conditions with british, dutch or german companies. I have never seen any of my colleagues (of course i have never done it either) delay a foreign aircraft to give priority to a national one just because he is national. Thinking that is really knowing NOTHING about air traffic control. But itīs ok, because thatīs not the pilotīs work, although some pilots think they are experts on the matter and we are a bunch of amateurs with headphones.
2.- Spanish controllers ARE controllers. Some of our procedures are somehow chaotic and maybe we are taught in a more creative way of controlling, because most of the time we donīt have much choice. Fly, in instance, to LPA on a busy morning, and you will see how we are giving vectors from east, west, north and south that aparently lead you nowhere but, surprise! you end up exactly 5 miles behind the preceding (not always a spanish one
) and 5 miles ahead of the one behind. The difference iīve seen with the british ATC system is that the procedures up there are made for high density traffic, and ours are still not (bureaucracy is still incredibly slow in Spain), so we have to deal with the same amount of traffic but with a lot more pressure, since we have to "create" the secuence from 0. A british controller would do the same if he worked here, and we would do like the british if we worked there. Itīs not a matter of high or low knowledge standards.
3.- Iīm fed up with the "itīs a matter of time to have a major accident down there". I have been reading that nonsense since a long long time ago... and iīm still waiting. Maybe we are not that bad?