Getting back to the topic, wasnt there a procedure that came in a few years ago when we were still at LATCC for times when we ran out of codes? I seem to remember that the letters SATN would be printed on the pending strips instead of an allocated sqwawk... if we saw this happen we were supposed to run to flight plans and tell them, and manually unpair sqwawks on aircraft that had left our airspace, so that the codes could then be reallocated a.s.a.p to aircraft waiting to depart (which could not depart until they had been allocated a sqwawk)... was this not the case or am I just imagining it? What happens now we are at Swanwick where we don't have pending strips? Is this procedure still in? How do we know if the system is running short of codes?
I seem to remember this coming in about the same time as those awful ''half strips'' were being banded about... do you remember? Those strips that had different fonts and would be printed in half the time as normal strips when it was busy cos the dear old printers couldn't get them out quick enough... only thing was they looked awful and had crap fonts on them... hmmm sounds familiar!!! Never saw any of those operationally either...