Just a plea from one of the Muscat controllers who only just survived the last two night shifts; please, UAE, if you tell us to hold aircraft in our airspace because of congestion in your airspace (we do understand), please do us the courtesy of automatically holding departures into our airspace until the traffic becomes manageable. We held dozens of aircraft in our airspace in ad hoc holding patterns with terrible weather throughout our FIR only to see wave after wave of departures from AUH and DXB sent into the clouds of holding traffic on our side of the boundary.
It would help if you could give us maybe a 15 minute warning that you may require holding in our airspace so that we can start, while we're not overloaded, to put into place some measures that will prevent what is happening now...chaos. Before you criticise us for not having contingency plans, please know that we are severely short-staffed and are unable to resectorise because of this shortage. Until we get more people, we really need to think about practical solutions before we think of theoretical ones.
Just out of interest for all you who fly through our airspace, we are often getting sector loadings of 30+ aircraft at a time. It's not fun during good weather and a positive nightmare in bad.
And to all you pilots who listened out carefully and responded well the last two nights, a big thank you. A bigger thank you to the EK pilot who read back an awful holding pattern clearance that I had to dream up quickly in the heat of battle. It went something along the lines of : "EKXXX, fly heading XXX for three minutes, then turn to heading XXX for one minute, then make a right turn towards XXX and set up a right hand holding pattern, two minute legs, inbound track will be that final course towards XXX, let me know if that makes sense!!" This was all said at Mach 5 and he got it in one. Well done, sir, my hat's off to you.