Originally Posted by
angryrat
To the ATCer's on this thread, thanks for the great job you do day in day out. Yes I admit I've sworn under my breath at you most days but it has never been personal and is more out of frustration than because of the job you are doing(I'm sure you have done the same with me). Like haughtney I get frustrated with the late notice, however, I get it is the system and I'd rather be given the option of losing that time myself than just being sent to a hold.
Thanks, I think most of us realise we're there to provide a service and do what we can within the confines of the system and the situation at hand. Sometimes it just all goes to poo and there's little we can do about it. Occasionally we're not on our game and make it harder. And yes, you get sworn at too, although I take the approach that life is too short to get overly worked up - I have to deal with the situation anyway so might as well fix it and move on.
Whatever you guys do please don't punish us all because of one airline. By all means send planet haughtney and his airline to the hold every time they need to lose time. Please let the rest of us make the situation work and beat them on efficiency.
It's a lot easier and safer for everyone to be doing the same thing. Yes, it's possible to run aircraft through holding traffic but it's complicated and easy to screw up. Like many things, it's possible but the extra workload is a threat. That said I'm sure we could accommodate haughtney and co. if it was made known their preference was to hold.
Since the ground delay program and this airborne strategy has been introduced, I have had to do very little holding in Oz. In fact we managed to lose 12 minutes without a vector into BNE the other night and yes we could hear the doubt in the controllers voice as to whether we would make it or not. Yes we had to work harder to make it happen but I believe that we saved my company 800kgs of fuel in one sector while some others just bleat.
And that's the crux of the discussion - by necessity you take the bottom up approach of managing a single aircraft while I have to take a more top down approach of managing a chunk of a whole system. You naturally want to optimise your single aircraft while I'm driven by system optimisation and the two don't always coincide. It's just the nature of the beast.
On average that means someone gets screwed for the benefit of the greater good. Better luck next time?