- There are 4 runways in Madrid, but still the controllers manage to make a mess of almost every approach by giving non sensical speeds and vectors despite having few aircraft to manage due to the amount of runways.
- When holding we are never given expected approach times or reasons for holding (its mostly because of their work to rule/strike), often have to ask several times but are usually ignored. Have on several occasions been told '10 minutes' only to be told 10 minutes later that it will be another 10 minutes etc etc.
- Whenever it gets a little bit busy you start hearing nervousness and panic in the controllers voices, whatever extremely low standard that they are trained to does not enable them to deal efficiently with large volumes of aircraft.
hi McNulty,
here A possible explanation to the problems you had in LEMD:
(It's a quote from a post of p_perez in ATC forum)
Veteran ATCO´s older than 57 (the most experienced) are not allowed to control anymore, and are now forced to do burocratic jobs. This has been a great loss for all of us, because of their huge experience on the job. At Madrid TMA, about 30% of the ATCO´s have been retired from operational jobs, and have been hardly replaced by already exploited colleagues or by non-operational ATCO´s forced to return to the ACC.