Morning Cossack
Yes, it's a great debate, enjoying this one.
I completely agree that the system does need to be standardised because a KLM will come onto the frequency and insist on 5 miles if he is put behind a 75, because of his national law, when everybody else has to take 4. Also, this level of anecdotal evidence is quite sufficient to tell me that this needs to be looked at. How should we go about starting that?
A couple of other things: at LL, unless there is no headwind, the holds are full for a significant part of the day anyway.
We have a PC which constantly monitors the landing rate, giving us a reading for each of the last quarter hours and predicting, on the basis of the last 6 landers, what we should achieve in the hour. It helps the traffic manager with flow.
As far as spacing is concerned; well firstly, THE Heathrow Director never has an off day, he is always on top form! But there is a lot of bu*****t about LL and how perfect everything and everybody is. The truth is that it isn't like that. It does happen that sometimes you don't feel like packing 'em in and you don't. I have seen even "the best" doing that but I have also seen the same people breaking wake vortex spacing in a misguided effort to reduce delays. A quarter mile or so and not corrected, even on still days.
A senior manager said to me about 3 years ago that one of his worries was that the LL team clearly felt they HAD to land huge numbers all the time and that exposed them to error. It is not our job to make up for capacity shortages and every time we try we take pressure off other people to do what they should do.
[ 02 August 2001: Message edited by: ZeroNine Left ]