Jay Arr
Yes I apologise for the slight angst there.
Its just that we've had hammered into us for the past few weeks that the new Stars were supposed to reduce the amount of second-guessing that went on from both sides with the Siera arrivals. You wondered what we're going to do with you and we wondered what speed you're doing and if you'd be able to get down.
The guys who designed it flew it in the CX sim and tell us that the track mileage is right for a reasonable VNAV profile.
We've been told not to track shorten unless its absolutely dead quiet as they're (CAD management and the AOs) sick of the number of go-arounds caused by unstable approaches.
As for the wild vectoring and speed control from Dotmi, then lay the blame mainly on the pathetic implementation of our Arrival manager software. Not so much the equipment fault but the total lack of training and proper staffing to get the most out of it. Its been suspended at the moment pending a complete overhaul so a lot of the flow control is being done manually right now which is a lot harder with the 3 sreams of traffic.
One can argue that the Siera and Sikou flights are now simply getting their rightful place in the sequence instead of wandering around the south china sea as they have for years. Agreed its not pretty at the moment but hopefully will improve as we get experience.