Some fair comments raised here but first let me clear up one point - the CFMU Helpdesk is in the flow management ops room whereas IFPS is completely separated. IFPS does not really know where the delays are in Europe, so if you ask us for a reroute, the chances are that we'll try and give one, but it is not particularly easy to know if it'll cause a delay while generally, FMD don't get too involved in reroutes. Strange? Talk to our management.
Staff are from all over Europe, not just Belgium, so the accents are not necessarily Flemish, but I know what you mean as we regularly get the same when we call companies trying to sort out problems. Have you ever tried calling a Turkish or Eastern European flight ops? Generally good, but it can get a bit interesting at times.
The phones are known to be faint, but we cannot find out why - done loads of checks, but nothing shows as a reason, sorry.
As for reroutes in IFPS, don't forget that we do 'em as a favour to you, so when things get a bit busier, we stop offering to help as it would cause even bigger delays in trying to sort out messages in the manual queue. Generally though, we'll normally try to help, but there will always be the luck of the draw in who picks up the call; again, we get some fairly poor reactions on occassion when we try to help out.
We aren't perfect by a wide margin, but you should see some of the bo!!ox that is sent to us, plus the same flight plan with the same errors sent in every day despite us calling to correct it every day. When we get AO visits it generally seems to sort out a lot of misconceptions and problems, so maybe you can sweettalk bosses into organising something (plus the beer here is damned good
)
FD