Time to revise the route structure?
as one who is forced by the present route structure which hasn't changed in years - not since OTR etc vanished in 02 - maybe it would be beneficial to revamp the route structure and enlarge the London TMA.
When I depart EMA in my 737NG I invariably have to fly through London to go anywhere south or east: I have to explain to the newbies why we always get a radar heading t the west and then vectors to BIG or DVR or SAM.
There doesn't exist a route that I can take from the North towards norwich and then out over Amsterdam to avoid London if I'm going to Poland or Germany.
If I'm going to Spain or the Canaries I can't take a diagonal SW towards Brecon to go around the TMA.
Similarly inbound i have to be at FL270 35 before LAM to be FL220 by HEMEL from the east when I could route further north and keep out of your way.
From Spain and the Canaries I have to route around the west of London - normally smack over the top of LHR to make 220 by HEMEL again.
It strikes me that working with old routes with modern high performance jet aircraft ( most of them don't like low speed descent as they simply don't go down!) with very accurute nav kit ( 2 x GPS, 2X IRs, DME DME upadting and 2 x FMC) is creating huge mounts of unnecessary work for you.
Is there a meachanism whereby you can, based on your knowledge of the inbound stream schedule, allocate a time and level at an inbound "gate" to each arriving aircraft?
The crew can then just plug that in to the FMC and let the airplane calculate it's cruise speed to make that "gate"; if it was done early enough, e.g. when BAW / VIR XXX calls for clearance to LHR at JFK and is given the gate time / FL as part of the clearance it makes the job easy as there is a lot of time to make adjustments.
Obviously slightly tricker for a shorter flight time e.g LBA to LHR or GLA to LHR but they can absorb the delay on the ground.
Something has to be done as the capacity of the airspace to absorb all the traffic is limited by the ATC capability.