Traffic at Heathrow is down by at least 10%, this has much to do with it. There is still extensive holding taking place at certain times of the day due to bunching.
We are still on winter schedules, with a drop in normal numbers of at least 10%. Ut is the quietest time of the year anyways, without the economic downturn.
AMAN is all very well, but when you have 3 different AC sectors feeding traffic to the TMA for one hold (say OCK), unless they talk to each other, aircraft will still arrive at the same time, regardless of what speed reduction they are given.
For AMAN to truly work, we would need en-route to look at AMAN, work out the delay or time to make up then say to each aircraft "arrange your flight to arrive at XXXHold at XXXXtime".
En-route do not have the capacity to do this, their airspace dimensions are simply not large enough and they also have standing agreements to meet, which sometimes requires high speeds. Coupled with that they need to use different speeds to present traffic properly.
We certainly don't have the airspace to do it in TC.
AMAN would be good in uncomplicated wide open airspace. As it is, it provides (when it works correctly), the arrival sequence information (it doesn't 'do' the sequencing UlsterPPL). Ideally this would start before the aircraft coast in when coming over the ocean, but that's not part of the AMAN brief.
Only yesterday, at a point when it was very quiet, AMAN was telling me that aircraft had no delay if they left the hold at xxxx time, but inreality they were coming straight off 10 minutes beforehand.
If I had slavishly followed AMAN, the aircraft would have been slowed down for no reason, and would probably had to have held, because it would have arrived at the same time as other aircraft!!!
AMAN is a tool, it does not replace good ATC practice.
If en-route follow AMAN rigourously, you will find the system failing even more until it becomes 100% accurate - this is because AC do not know if aircraft are likely to come straight off or have to hold. Slowing down aircraft just because AMAN says you need to is foolhardy. It should be used as an indication only.