LVP - Low Viz Procedures

Thank you.

LGW has a very weird micro-climate. Being on the river Mole, you often - especially at this time of year - get a load of fog that is not there even 1 mile from the airport. Many a time I left at at 06:00 in thick fog, yet Horley, less than a mile away was clear. And it lingers, sometimes for hours.

easyJet had scheduled 222 departures out of a total 434 today. Naturally, ATC and LVP affects them far more than the next highest airline, BA Euroflyer on 47. I hope I'm wrong, but I expect many more cancellations.

Thanks for the informantion. I think that 47 includes the BA long haul flights too and the mainline Glasgow flight.

My apologies, yes. The data I get doesn't split the two entities. Tampa cancelled mainline. Not the first.

Norse cuts flights to SFO again
 

Norse has futher trimmed their seasonal flights to San Francisco. All flights after Oct 7th ( including mine!) have now been cancelled. No alternative or compensation offered.

Norse Atlantic announced a couple of weeks ago that San Francisco was being axed from it's network. Although LGW-SFO was seasonal the route won't be returning for summer 2024.

You mentioned that all flights after October 07 2023 have been cancelled.

Norse Atlantic had originally stated that the last flight between LGW and SFO would be on the 28 October, at the end of the IATA northern summer 2023 season.

Although they are only required to compensate you if the cancellation is within two weeks of departure, they are required to re-route you on another airline if you wish. Sounds like they think that only applies within two weeks too, which isn’t correct.

Can I just say well done London Gatwick. We are here flying to Venice and both Easy Bag Drop and Security were a breeze. Both swift and polite all round...

Can’t be quite so congratulatory of the Gatwick ATC management yet again today. Flow rate restriction of 16 arrivals per hour. Absolutely shambolic.

Not a dig at your post Kiltrash - glad you had a good experience. Sadly for arriving passengers in LGW today then very big delays knocking into departures as the afternoon progressed.

Yup...again. 35 U2 departures cancelled so far...the clusterf.ery I predicted in March has been played out far too often this summer. Awful for the passengers.

A daily cap of 800 flight movements a day is in place until 1st October:

https://www.mediacentre.gatwickairpo...ddd-40f32.html

While waiting for our flight to show gate no we noticed U28011 dep time 09.15 was shown as please wait....this got my curiosity and the aircraft arr into LGW on time at 08.10 according to FR24.... it eventually took off 12.24 so I thought ' tech issue ' ...perhaps just a flow rate issue ....Did feel sorry for the SLF..🙁

Our friends were on that flight,it was an issue with their flight plan which tower told Captain about as they had waited to go at the hold ..they had togo back to stand to refuel etc …they did indeed get away after 12.00 ..it wasn’t connected with the other issue ..the aircraft’s third sector of its day was canx .

Is the limit on flights at Gatwick due to genuine illness amongst ATC staff, or is there any sort of deliberate sick-out ?
If it's genuine, are there any underlying factors (e.g. disgruntled staff), lousy planning of training junior staff or maybe overwork and burn-out of staff over the peak summer or is it a case of a lot of different uncontrollable factors like Covid all coming at once ?
Is this likely to be just for a few days, or is there a non-trivial chance of an announcement this will continue into early October, or be in effect during half term as well ?

Good question, as someone on the receiving end I’d like to know the answer too.

Well, according to this article in the Belfast Telegraph, the cap will run until Sunday and has been imposed as 30% of NATS tower staff are unavailable for a variety of medical reasons, including COVID.

Excellent article from Michele Robson who was a controller for NATS for over 20 years

Gatwick launches flight curb due to ATC staffing

https://www.turningleftforless.com/w...r-1024x568.jpg

You may have seen a few stories in the press recently about the delays at Gatwick as a result of a lack of ATC staff. To put it in context, ATC towers at airports are managed by separate ATC companies who bid for the contract. This is unlike the two UK ATC centres that are run by NATS as a monopoly and subject to price regulations by the CAA. At airports, the airport owner decides how much they are willing to pay for ATC and accepts a bid based on price and performance.

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NATS inherited the staff from the previous company, so they had no control over how many they would get. Controllers can choose to transfer to the new company or leave. Unfortunately, you can’t just transfer controllers from say Heathrow, as a) they still need extensive training to work at Gatwick and b) then it leaves Heathrow short. You also can’t train new controllers quickly as it takes around 18 months at a minimum, and only around 1% of those that apply make it through to be a live controller.

At airports, they are very susceptible to lack of staff due to sickness as they only have a small number of staff due to the number of positions in a tower plus contingency. No ATC provider can afford to have unlimited numbers of staff sitting around when they are competing on price. Once NATS have trained more controllers, then staff sickness will not cause such an issue. According to Gatwick airport, 30% of NATS tower staff are currently unavailable for a variety of medical reasons including covid.

So this leaves us in the situation today where Gatwick today implemented a temporary limit on daily flight movements to prevent delays and last-minute cancellations for passengers.

The decision was made alongside NATS, and means the airport will be limited to 800 flights a day. This means both departure and arrival flights. The restrictions start today and will remain in place until Sunday, 1 October.

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“We are working closely with NATS to build resilience in the control tower, and this decision means we can prevent as much disruptions as possible.

“London Gatwick would like to apologise to any passengers who have been impacted by these restrictions.”
Before the limit was put in place the movements expected for this week were as follows:

Tuesday- 800 movements
Weds – 829 movements
Thursday – 840 movements
Friday –865 movements
Saturday – 800 movements
Sunday – 830 movements

As it has only just been announced, I have not heard of specific cancellations, but if you have a booking this week from Gatwick I would be keeping a close eye on it.

I do wonder if all this goes back to that t@at MOL pushing fares down. Eventually everyone’s costs are squeezed so low either other ancillaries such as drop off charges are needed, or there is a reduction in service levels which is where we are at.

Their ops at LGW is tiny

Thats not the point.

Great article, thanks for sharing this

Glad it was enjoyed..after ready many OTT newspaper ones ,that was well written and to the point ..I know that a good few NATS controllers left the tower in 2014 and it seems the German Co did not recruit many after they took over ..leaving NATS very short now

Good to see an article with actual statistics and reasoning behind it... Just need a few more controllers which is easier said then done

The impact was more that full service carriers introduced the bundling concept in pursuit of maintaining market share even though their business models are not competitive on price. Ryanair delivers to expectations, some full service carriers with legacy brands do not.

But Ryanair have lead the charge on airport costs

You're clearly confused. This is NATS, nothing to do with Ryanair. This seems to be just gross mismanagement and a board (including some prominent airlines BA, Easyjet etc) prioritising shareholder return over system/staff investment. £550 million returned to shareholders over the last few years with an ever-decreasing service to the airline community from which they derive their income.

NATS have to compete to get the LGW ATC contract, so will be looking to provide it at the lowest cost. They may not be directly involved, but Ryanair have been at the vanguard of the push to reduce airport costs leading to reduced T&C's and lower staffing levels which are now across the industry. This is the point being made. As we regularly see there is now little flex in the system for when sh*t happens, and we all know it happens often enough

Ground handling
 

Anyone know who has the contract for Air Mauritius/Ethiopian/China Southern?

Funny how Ryanair end up getting the blame for everything, it’s obviously nothing to do with Ryanair.

I read somewhere that some airlines may be operating from alternative Airports for a short period, I can’t find it now and not sure if I read it properly, has anyone heard anything along those lines or was I imagining it.

Compete with whom exactly?

Quite simple, the exact answer is they have to compete with other Air Navigaton Service Providers who could/would bid on the service provision contract.

Other ANSPs like DFS. NATS lost the Gatwick contract in 2014 to DFS, as Gatwick Airport obviously wanted a cheaper option. DFS bailed out last year and didn't complete the contract and NATS have had to go back in and sort it out. If Gatwick airport had left NATS in the tower they probably wouldnt have been in this mess now.

The concept of ATC based on price is weapons grade foolishness. There are some things that should be open to competitive tendering but ATC provision has VERY few specialist providers of which NATS is one.

Railtrack

The other week several of us on here were debating possible long haul contenders at LGW.

We discussed several possible candidate's including China Southern Airlines which we eventually dismissed.

How things change in such a short space of time.

China Southern Airlines announces Zhengzhou to London Gatwick.

Effectivel 12 December 2023 and operated twice weekly by B788.

CZ653 CGO 14.00 LGW 17.20 days 26 788
CZ654 LGW 20.20 CGO 15.00+1 days 26 788

Meanwhile Sri Lankan Airways want to add an additional three flights between Colombo and LHR. The airline currently operates the route on a daily basis but wants to increase it to 10 weekly.

The airline has recently stated in the travel media that those extra three flights might be difficult to obtain at LHR due to a lack of available and suitable slots.

Debating the topic again, could Sri Lankan Airlines be a possible future contender for LGW. Of course, it would be a service resumption for the airline. Air Lanka which the airline was previously known as flew to LGW from 1979 to 1991.

Sri Lankan have 9 weekly LHR slots in winter I think? UL505 runs weekends in addition to the daily UL 503.

To be totally honest Skip when I originally read the article regarding those extra three flights I was sort of under the impression that they flew at least twice daily on certain day's during the winter.

They were leasing some slots at some point. Perhaps it's those extra flights during the winter season that they want to make permanent.

On side note. It's great to see the beautiful country of Sri Lanka on the rebound after such a tormented period. There has been a lot of positive coverage of the country on TV over the last year and lots of YouTube footage. After previously visiting Sri Lanka on several occasions I can only hope that the increase in trade as well as travel and tourism will benefit the entire country.

So much for flow control restrictions this week, taking a Jet2 diversion today, Ok it was PAN so emergency but STN only up road - and a BizJet arrival today. Couldn't the later movement been used for an Easyjet canx flight?

in the jet2 diversion case this was a medical emergency that required immediate medical intervention - STN might only be up the road but so too is EMA it’s final destination. The flight deck must have deemed it serious enough to get straight on the ground otherwise surely 10mins more and they could have been at EMA. There are also a lot more factors to consider in a medical divert and going to a base where there is no Jet2 ground staff is again not advised unless in an emergency and clearly this was.