Glad to know it worked for you - from the ATC perspective, as you said, R/T was greatly reduced, which, as planned, gives much more time to concentrate on getting the sequence right.
A very small number of aircraft couldn't fly the procedure and/ or had programming errors in the FMS, the main one being Fly Dubai having DB421 as a fly over, rather than a fly by waypoint, and is already being addressed.
One of the problems for us is that many of the confliction points have either changed or been compounded by new conflicts which leads many to overuse vertical of separation, resulting in quite a few aircraft turning downwind too high. This should improve rapidly with experience - although we DID simulate this, the time allocated was fairly restricted.
Another that surface was the inordinately long time that some aircraft ware taking to turn when given a base heading to shorten the downwind. While we realise that there was a howling easterly up the chuff, 4 miles to START turning, after being given the instruction, is not conducive to building a nice, tight sequence..... not sure what CRM is going on there - I guess it's something more complicated than selecting heading mode and turning the bug but we need to figure this one out sharpish.
Quite a few were also clearly expecting to fly the full "trombone" and descending accordingly - notwithstanding being offered fewer track miles - the best example of which was the Joburg (I think) flight that arrived at MIADA FL220. While we realise that this is the planned route, there are quite a number of options to shorten the track - IF the profile allows it.
On the departure front, the combination of 20KTS on the nose, (relatively) low temps and speed restrictions on the SIDs meant that climb rates were pretty good, helping a lot with crossing points.
Expect it to take a good week or so for everyone to start getting comfortable with their ability to predict the conflicts and plan accordingly and things should be a lot smoother and quieter. However, please note that this on its' own does absolutely nothing for runway capacity - in fact, for DEPS, it's probably slightly LOWER, due to us no longer being able to turn you at 1000ft.
Thanks all for your patience and understanding
Guy.
p.s. Air Arabia please note - YES, we DO need you to fly the STAR speeds, NO, you CAN'T go direct NOSMO (the STAR takes you around the Dubai traffic for a reason!
) and please don't even think of asking for the other end - if it is feasible, we will offer it!