ali bongo,
please dont take this the wrong way, its not meant as a jibe at you or those that do 'help out' in the ops room.Its all well and good saying they should man the ops room properly, but they are never going to do that whilst you and others are 'helping out', thereby solving the problem. its the same argument for those atco's doing aava's. the ops room is supposedly not undermanned, so why the need for aava's? thats because its far cheaper for the company to plug a short fall on a temporary basis, than to man the ops room to the max at all times. This is also my main gripe with mr barron's latest spout on pravdanet about perceived night shift inefficiencies. He would love to be able to tell us all with 2 days notice whether you will be nights or days, ( and i fully expect the union to cave on that one as well) because its a far more efficient use of manpower/womanpower. that , however would surely end up with the current watch system being thrown in the bin, along with peoples abilities to plan anything for days 5 and 6 of their cycle. The problem is we man the ops room at night, planning for the maximum amount of traffic, so that our customers can get their most efficient routings without flow restrictions, that we cant put on for oceanic traffic anyway. however in this , now, FOR PROFIT environment we live in, the beancounters see this as counter productive to the making of as much profit as they can , to ensure tea and bonuses all round. Sure they can suggest maybe losing 1 or 2 people off the nights or some other hairbrained scheme where swanwick work one night and scacc the other, or some other cr@p like that, but i for one do not want to be sat there on that night when all the sectors are open and i call for a planner and there isnt one. Air traffic control is a safety service, it should be run as such , with safety in mind, and not profit. its all well and good wanting to be lean and mean, but you may end up being the leanest, meanest person ever to stand before the judge. i guarantee you mr.b wont be standing next to you, he'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
rant over