Originally Posted by
portmanteau
Framer, thanks for the recognition but Atcos like millions of other people, including pilots, work during the day and during the night. I never heard of problems due to circadian cycles in my time in the air and in Atc. In Atc one of the skills is in knowing what the aircraft are going to say before they say it. It works, most of the time. Also it is unlikely that even a single controller on duty in the Tower will be alone. Alongside him/her will be a clued-up assistant.
I certainly don't feel on the top of my game during the night and work in a tower where I do work alone, all positions combined, without an assistant, usually using a crossing runway, noise preferential configuration answering phone calls about sundry crap.
Controlling the frequency (all frequencies are cross-coupled) is paramount and prioritizing your tasks to maintain control comes with experience. Just a couple of "say agains" and that control can be lost for a while and the timing of a take off clearance maybe delayed so that you can't shoot that gap any more.
Maintaining an effective traffic scan is paramount but there's no doubting I could do it better during the day when I was more alert and so don't push it. I do sit right next to the coffee machine though.
framer: If we fattened up the night shift to allow two controllers to work all night, we would lose one from the much busier times of the day which we already can't fully staff most days without copious overtime. If we can't staff the unit fully with what we do now, we're not going to get very close to adding one more on nights.