Was interesting to see that Brest complied with it - almost.......
What did we "... almost
" comply with ?
AFAIK, levels were adhered to.
"RFL adherence" has been part of our SOPs for more than 3 months now (pilots get a reminder each time they ask to diverge from RFL !). So that wasn't a big deal for us (except the paper work). The trick is that we adhere to the sectors, not to the actual RFL, in order to keep the thing a bit flexible.
French ATC did not discover Flow management yesterday evening. (I won't explain you history of Flow Management in Europe)
In the trial, one of the questions being : "How many ACFTs entered a wrong sector ?",
The answer will be close to nothing over the two days in Brest.
I remember one day (2 months ago ?), when I worked our "North" sectors (south of LND, BHD, LORKU, LELNA, above FL345) when I should have been protected by a scenario for London's departures (no delay involved, just FL330 max entry France).
I had to deal with a 150% overload for more than one hour and a half because London ACC disregarded the scenario.
Criticism is easy.
Happy to help the Flow Management guys when they try to protect us.
Hope they will find (
good) answers to their questions.
The only thing I don't understand is why we didn't file the papers without telling the companies, two days before and/or after, in order to get a "raw sample" of the usual traffic. Just to have something to compare to.