Hi Pirate, just missed your post.
The Heathrow strips are about 1400m apart meaning that as our primary radar update rate is less than 5 seconds we don't need PRM. We would however need monitoring controllers for ICAO standard Independent parallel ops. and at Heathrow that will be a challenge. They are running about 20% understaffed now, adding an extra FIN and two monitoring controllers (3 total) needs 4 ATCOs per watch! That's 20 extra staff or an increase of 50% at a unit where the failure rate is high. May have to get creative - such as "Monitoring Only" validations etc.
We can do VISUALLY separated parallels (not approaches maintaining VMC)now but the nature of the Heathrow operation almost makes it pointless. If we land on the departure runway it is usally at a rate of 6 per hour. We always choose to put the extra aircraft in a vortex gap in the traffic on the landing runway. As that gap must always remain - there is no point in going absolutely parallel, you might as well go 2.5 and 2.5.
.4
Last edited by 120.4; 8th Dec 2007 at 22:26.