NATS latest "brainwave" to save money
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NATS latest "brainwave" to save money
Thought there might have been something already on here about PB's latest piece of nonsense. To save money he wants to extend oceanic airspace at night to close RADAR covered sectors to save money. How is this contributing to safety? Is he slightly retarded? Did he miss the whole Uberlingen incident? I really despair working for this company at the moment. It is run by people who have no concept of what ATC is all about. Any money made should go back into the infrastructure to make it better ie better equipment. To close radar covered airspace to replace it with procedural sectors is complete madness. Let's get rid of phones and go back to bits of string attached to plastic cups and call it progress!! I would love him to justify this in court when 2 planes collide in one of his new "budget sectors" when a fully servicable radar feed could have been used. Anyone who does nights will know that even if you only have 2 on freq that they will inevitably pass over each other 1000" apart even though they have 1000's of miles of airspace to use. Garbling won't be an issue when you can't see them at all!
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NATS, a customer and environmentally friendly company - NOT.
Let's have all our customers flying extra miles at non-optimum levels in procedural airspace just so we can save a couple of ATCO salaries.
Or maybe not, as when we go into PC we are likely to need just as many on nights, if not more, as the band-boxing options are going to complicate things.
I have just spent a few hours with my colleagues sending aircraft from one end of Scottish airspace to the other at the level THEY want.
Come on all you bright sparks in management, let's find a way to do that ALL the time.
Let's have all our customers flying extra miles at non-optimum levels in procedural airspace just so we can save a couple of ATCO salaries.
Or maybe not, as when we go into PC we are likely to need just as many on nights, if not more, as the band-boxing options are going to complicate things.
I have just spent a few hours with my colleagues sending aircraft from one end of Scottish airspace to the other at the level THEY want.
Come on all you bright sparks in management, let's find a way to do that ALL the time.
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Old News.
This first surfaced a few months ago on another intranet thread when someone in an office (never having worked operationaly) mooted that to save money, night-time operations for UK could be moved to one centre i.e. Swanwick would close at night. Now I don't mind the question being asked by a non-ops person - they can't be expected to understand how we work if the work they do for NATS does not have a direct impact opn what we do in the Ops room.
It's the muppets that do have a direct say on our work that then run with the idea thinking it's great that worry me.
Obviously for it to work the whole concept of ATC regulation and licensing would need to be bypassed or overhauled - and I'm sure that operators into LTMA airfields at night woud love to go to a procedural and therefore less efficient operation.
The fact that on the intranet someone from Oceanic has stated that procedural control is very modern nowadays misses the point totally. Procedural control has it place - but if we could have radar coverage over the ocean, we would use that instead of procedural - therein lies the whole point.
These schemes are dreamt up by people who have either never worked in an ops room, or have not set foot on watch for a long time.
Speaking purely from an LTMA point of view (but obviously it affects AC as well as the feeding and receiving unit), the amount of arrivals, especially until 3am (ish) is actually fairly significant.
Of course, no thought is made of the extra manning required up north to work the initial start of the transatlantic arrivals with the extra workload of London FIR traffic...
Also, not thought to the licensing requirements that state an early shift cannot commence before 0530 - therefore night shift manning will still be required. (SRATCOH rules - designed to ensure safe ATC provision - maybe some non operational people should do some research).
This is the same sort of claptrap that is thought up by non ops people or people who only have experience of their own operation.
There are rules in place now of what you can and can't do on a night shift to amuse yourself (more to the point, stay awake) in the wee dark hours - you know the 0300 to 0500 when the body is at its lowest ebb. For instance, you're allowed to read a book, but not allowed to watch a DVD on your laptop (even with volume very low and your RT on loud speaker).
The fact that a fast-paced film is possibly more likely to keep you alert than the soporific effect that reading has on most people is neither here nor there - some HF person has stated what they think we should do, based on no experience of working ATC shifts and without even shadowing for a couple of cycles to try to understand.
Bear in mind though that a tactic throughout the history of management/union relations in all types of employment has been for management to put some ridiculously stupid ideas on the table in order to slip in some other, fairly odious but less dodgy practice.
Then when the new rules or whatever are adopted, the sheep collectively sigh with relief and say 'yeah, it isn't great, but its better than what they really wanted', when in fact the management have achieved what they set out to do.
Smoke and mirrors - the biggest mistake anyone can make is to think that senior management are stupid - they are far from it.
This first surfaced a few months ago on another intranet thread when someone in an office (never having worked operationaly) mooted that to save money, night-time operations for UK could be moved to one centre i.e. Swanwick would close at night. Now I don't mind the question being asked by a non-ops person - they can't be expected to understand how we work if the work they do for NATS does not have a direct impact opn what we do in the Ops room.
It's the muppets that do have a direct say on our work that then run with the idea thinking it's great that worry me.
Obviously for it to work the whole concept of ATC regulation and licensing would need to be bypassed or overhauled - and I'm sure that operators into LTMA airfields at night woud love to go to a procedural and therefore less efficient operation.
The fact that on the intranet someone from Oceanic has stated that procedural control is very modern nowadays misses the point totally. Procedural control has it place - but if we could have radar coverage over the ocean, we would use that instead of procedural - therein lies the whole point.
These schemes are dreamt up by people who have either never worked in an ops room, or have not set foot on watch for a long time.
Speaking purely from an LTMA point of view (but obviously it affects AC as well as the feeding and receiving unit), the amount of arrivals, especially until 3am (ish) is actually fairly significant.
Of course, no thought is made of the extra manning required up north to work the initial start of the transatlantic arrivals with the extra workload of London FIR traffic...
Also, not thought to the licensing requirements that state an early shift cannot commence before 0530 - therefore night shift manning will still be required. (SRATCOH rules - designed to ensure safe ATC provision - maybe some non operational people should do some research).
This is the same sort of claptrap that is thought up by non ops people or people who only have experience of their own operation.
There are rules in place now of what you can and can't do on a night shift to amuse yourself (more to the point, stay awake) in the wee dark hours - you know the 0300 to 0500 when the body is at its lowest ebb. For instance, you're allowed to read a book, but not allowed to watch a DVD on your laptop (even with volume very low and your RT on loud speaker).
The fact that a fast-paced film is possibly more likely to keep you alert than the soporific effect that reading has on most people is neither here nor there - some HF person has stated what they think we should do, based on no experience of working ATC shifts and without even shadowing for a couple of cycles to try to understand.
Bear in mind though that a tactic throughout the history of management/union relations in all types of employment has been for management to put some ridiculously stupid ideas on the table in order to slip in some other, fairly odious but less dodgy practice.
Then when the new rules or whatever are adopted, the sheep collectively sigh with relief and say 'yeah, it isn't great, but its better than what they really wanted', when in fact the management have achieved what they set out to do.
Smoke and mirrors - the biggest mistake anyone can make is to think that senior management are stupid - they are far from it.
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It would be good to hear from any Manc APC controllers. Alledgedly due to the newly signed loss making crappy contract that they work under, procedural control on nights with reduced manning has been mooted to help reduce the deficit.
Again alledgedly the feeling at other airfields is that senior management non-air traffic experts/professionals are trying this on at their airfields as well.
Nats, the leading company in Air Traffic, what a joke!
Again alledgedly the feeling at other airfields is that senior management non-air traffic experts/professionals are trying this on at their airfields as well.
Nats, the leading company in Air Traffic, what a joke!
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To save money he wants to extend oceanic airspace at night to close RADAR covered sectors to save money. How is this contributing to safety? Is he slightly retarded? Did he miss the whole Uberlingen incident? <snip> I would love him to justify this in court when 2 planes collide in one of his new "budget sectors" when a fully servicable radar feed could have been used. :
Anyone who does nights will know that even if you only have 2 on freq that they will inevitably pass over each other 1000" apart even though they have 1000's of miles of airspace to use. Garbling won't be an issue when you can't see them at all!
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You clearly missed the point. They use procedural over the ocean because they DON'T have radar coverage. Why would you use this process when you have a perfectly good radar? And the point about being 1000' apart is that if you cant SEE them then pilot error, wrong pressure setting blah blah blah can cause incidents. Take a look at the incident reports in oceanic airspace and maybe you would see the point a bit better ie pilots appearing at the wrong entry point only picked up when seen on RADAR
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Is the use of procedural on the Oceanic routes currently unsafe? obviously not so why would extending its use to other bits of airspace with exactly the same separation standards suddenly become unsafe?
Last edited by anotherthing; 14th Sep 2009 at 12:45.
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And the point about being 1000' apart is that if you cant SEE them then pilot error, wrong pressure setting blah blah blah can cause incidents.
Take a look at the incident reports in oceanic airspace and maybe you would see the point a bit better ie pilots appearing at the wrong entry point only picked up when seen on RADAR
BD
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Hmm.. 60 miles separation in the UIR/FIR... that'll work.
BD
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[QUOTE] Team 'How about thinking realistically instead of this is how we've always done it?' Or team 'oh my god you know that procedural control is really unsafe and we can't possibly continue that way'.
To some extent I'm playing devils advocate and trying to point out that the objections raised so far in this forum are not convincing.
If you think this is all madness and you just don't believe it, wait until you see what the EU is aiming to introduce through SESAR
BD
To some extent I'm playing devils advocate and trying to point out that the objections raised so far in this forum are not convincing.
If you think this is all madness and you just don't believe it, wait until you see what the EU is aiming to introduce through SESAR
BD
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OK,
Here's a novel approach for NATS before it sinks millions into another project (considering we've already signed up to iTec - a £250million project which in the blurb states that for it to work is reliant on all of NATS being EFD compliant... even though at the moment there are major stumbling blocks with TC EFD)... why not approach the airlines and say to them:
" Hello dear customer(s), we at NATS are trying to save a little bit of money here and there, and one of the ideas we have come up with involves a nightime extension of the airspace that is covered procedurally.
What this means is that we will not be as efficient with our airspace. We are doing this because at the times we are talking about, there is less traffic density.
The fact that you spiffing chaps tend to fly the same routes as each other at the same time (i.e. although traffic is reduced, it tends to be doing the same thing) is a trifling matter that we can look at some other time, or more likely, conveniently overlook.
We hope to save NATS somewhere in the region of £xxx per year. Of course the downside with inefficient use of airspace (something you, our lovely customers are always badgering NATS about) is that you fine chaps will have to fly further and for longer. The cost to you chaps will most likely be more than the saving to NATS.
Hows about it then, fine customers???"
Why not do some number crunching then approach them? Hell if their fuel bills etc are more than NATS would save on a handful of controllers, they'd probably pay the wages out of their own pockets...
The night-time window that the skies over the UK are quiet enough for procedural control not to have a big impact is so small that this must surely be a non starter.
The fact that the window will fall well within nighttime manning hours, as laid down by SRG, means that we will still have to employ ATCOs on bona fide nightshift either side of the window, with all the ramifications of SRATCOH that incurs.
Just where is the benefit to NATS and the customers?
Procedural control is a wonderful thing, but it is used where radar is unavailable or not viable, not as a replacement because it is a better system
NATS once had pride in being one of the foremost ANSPs. Reducing the efficiency of our service is yet another backward step that is only seen as good by number crunchers, their sycophantic yes men, and people who have either never controlled, or haven't controlled for years.
As for hare-brained schemes, surely we would be cheaper employing 50 chimps with typewriters - they might not come up with a Shakespeare play, but they stand a good chance of coming up with a more realistic way ahead for NATS.
Hell, we only need to source 40, the other 10 can come from the chimps who currently write the OPNOTs that appear on EBS every day.
Here's a novel approach for NATS before it sinks millions into another project (considering we've already signed up to iTec - a £250million project which in the blurb states that for it to work is reliant on all of NATS being EFD compliant... even though at the moment there are major stumbling blocks with TC EFD)... why not approach the airlines and say to them:
" Hello dear customer(s), we at NATS are trying to save a little bit of money here and there, and one of the ideas we have come up with involves a nightime extension of the airspace that is covered procedurally.
What this means is that we will not be as efficient with our airspace. We are doing this because at the times we are talking about, there is less traffic density.
The fact that you spiffing chaps tend to fly the same routes as each other at the same time (i.e. although traffic is reduced, it tends to be doing the same thing) is a trifling matter that we can look at some other time, or more likely, conveniently overlook.
We hope to save NATS somewhere in the region of £xxx per year. Of course the downside with inefficient use of airspace (something you, our lovely customers are always badgering NATS about) is that you fine chaps will have to fly further and for longer. The cost to you chaps will most likely be more than the saving to NATS.
Hows about it then, fine customers???"
Why not do some number crunching then approach them? Hell if their fuel bills etc are more than NATS would save on a handful of controllers, they'd probably pay the wages out of their own pockets...
The night-time window that the skies over the UK are quiet enough for procedural control not to have a big impact is so small that this must surely be a non starter.
The fact that the window will fall well within nighttime manning hours, as laid down by SRG, means that we will still have to employ ATCOs on bona fide nightshift either side of the window, with all the ramifications of SRATCOH that incurs.
Just where is the benefit to NATS and the customers?
Procedural control is a wonderful thing, but it is used where radar is unavailable or not viable, not as a replacement because it is a better system
NATS once had pride in being one of the foremost ANSPs. Reducing the efficiency of our service is yet another backward step that is only seen as good by number crunchers, their sycophantic yes men, and people who have either never controlled, or haven't controlled for years.
As for hare-brained schemes, surely we would be cheaper employing 50 chimps with typewriters - they might not come up with a Shakespeare play, but they stand a good chance of coming up with a more realistic way ahead for NATS.
Hell, we only need to source 40, the other 10 can come from the chimps who currently write the OPNOTs that appear on EBS every day.
Last edited by anotherthing; 14th Sep 2009 at 14:34.
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I have had an even better idea, in addition to keeping our customers in a procedural environment for longer, let's TURN OFF all our radars and enroute navaids along the west coast of the UK and save a bit on the electricity bill at the same time.
After all, the US provides GPS for free and the pilots NEVER input the wrong way-points so they WILL all be safe, albeit burning more fuel because they are flying further at a lower than optimal altitude.
One more thing, let's close ALL the Advisory Routes just in case we might have an incident and only provide Basic Service below FL195, that'll save a few bob in ATCO salaries and reduce our corporate liability.
After all, the US provides GPS for free and the pilots NEVER input the wrong way-points so they WILL all be safe, albeit burning more fuel because they are flying further at a lower than optimal altitude.
One more thing, let's close ALL the Advisory Routes just in case we might have an incident and only provide Basic Service below FL195, that'll save a few bob in ATCO salaries and reduce our corporate liability.
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Gentlemen and Ladies.
This "Clear Blue Sky" thinking is not a new phenomenon. At West Drayton we once had the Chairman of NATS ask why we needed so many people on a night shift as Heathrow is closed at night!
HURRAH!! Bonuses all round!!!!
This "Clear Blue Sky" thinking is not a new phenomenon. At West Drayton we once had the Chairman of NATS ask why we needed so many people on a night shift as Heathrow is closed at night!
HURRAH!! Bonuses all round!!!!
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Debated this on a nightshift recently. Can't see how this is an improvement to the current services provided especially when a/c are piling off the ocean at 3am in trail at most levels above FL300. How will procedural cope with that?
Or if it's maybe for the 2 hour block where it, sometimes, is quite quiet, I can't see how that will be more cost effective for anyone involved considering the setup costs, validations, training, lack of directs, and on all sectors I can think of where it could be used, a sector team will still be needed to handle a/c requiring descent into the uk airfields and dublin/amsterdam (i.e. those that start descent in London FIR)
Or if it's maybe for the 2 hour block where it, sometimes, is quite quiet, I can't see how that will be more cost effective for anyone involved considering the setup costs, validations, training, lack of directs, and on all sectors I can think of where it could be used, a sector team will still be needed to handle a/c requiring descent into the uk airfields and dublin/amsterdam (i.e. those that start descent in London FIR)
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the
reactions you refer to had already stated the arguments what 'intherealworld' mentioned - he or she just added their weight to the replies...
Post number 2.
Post number 3
Post number 14
Maybe next time other respondents should say they debated the facts for you to take them seriously or consider them worthy of having an opinion... heaven forbid one person on their own can come out with reasonable arguments
kneejerk
Post number 2.
Let's have all our customers flying extra miles at non-optimum levels in procedural airspace just so we can save a couple of ATCO salaries.
...when we go into PC we are likely to need just as many on nights, if not more, as the band-boxing options are going to complicate things.
...when we go into PC we are likely to need just as many on nights, if not more, as the band-boxing options are going to complicate things.
Post number 3
...the whole concept of ATC regulation and licensing would need to be bypassed or overhauled...
...the amount of arrivals, especially until 3am (ish) is actually fairly significant.
Of course, no thought is made of the extra manning required up north to work the initial start of the transatlantic arrivals with the extra workload of London FIR traffic...
Also, not thought to the licensing requirements that state an early shift cannot commence before 0530 - therefore night shift manning will still be required.
...the amount of arrivals, especially until 3am (ish) is actually fairly significant.
Of course, no thought is made of the extra manning required up north to work the initial start of the transatlantic arrivals with the extra workload of London FIR traffic...
Also, not thought to the licensing requirements that state an early shift cannot commence before 0530 - therefore night shift manning will still be required.
Post number 14
The night-time window that the skies over the UK are quiet enough for procedural control not to have a big impact is so small that this must surely be a non starter.
The fact that the window will fall well within nighttime manning hours, as laid down by SRG, means that we will still have to employ ATCOs on bona fide nightshift either side of the window...
The fact that the window will fall well within nighttime manning hours, as laid down by SRG, means that we will still have to employ ATCOs on bona fide nightshift either side of the window...
Maybe next time other respondents should say they debated the facts for you to take them seriously or consider them worthy of having an opinion... heaven forbid one person on their own can come out with reasonable arguments
We hope to save NATS somewhere in the region of £xxx per year. Of course the downside with inefficient use of airspace (something you, our lovely customers are always badgering NATS about) is that you fine chaps will have to fly further and for longer. The cost to you chaps will most likely be more than the saving to NATS.
and before BDiONU et al sit up and quote delays and profits, I'm talking about the sustainabliity of the present system which rewards short termism with hefty bonuses, pays dividends through asset stripping and can now barely staff some of the busiest ATC locations in the world through overtime.
And don't even get me started on reporting delays due staffing as weather regs or claims the AMAN debacle did not cause any diversions.