Here on the western edge of the prairies, the temperature shot up overnight to a balmy, positively tropical, -11 celcius! That's t-shirt weather! May take a chance and not even plug the car in today....
Still waiting for you to pop over for a beer or three, Jerricho! Be sure to stay over a Tuesday night - we need all the help we can get with the pub quiz.

:ok:

LnL, there's a trip planned over your way once all this white stuff is gone. So I guess I'll see you in July ;).

We expect the thaw in late May actually, so there! July is hailstorm season...
:hmm:

LnL,I'll think you'll find that Jerricho,pub quiz and help don't really go together.

You're up late Hammy. You wet the bed?

Unfortunately he's correct.

Maybe it was someone elses bed.......:E

But since the music questions will be about Men at Work, Crowded bleedin' 'Ouse and Midnight bloody Oil (the other half will be a mix of heavy 80s rock and C&W; welcome to Alberta), he might be handy!
As for the geography section, is there anywhere Jerricho hasn't been?

Fiji.

I think that will be next on the ATC world tour. ;)

Coldest don't mean the coolest..if you follow my drift !!!

Coolest would have to be Tobago tower. That would be cool.

How about the busiest unit?

I start the bidding at 1.7 million.....:cool:


07th Jan - Year end figures from National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the UK's leading air traffic management provider, show that in 2004 it handled more flights than ever with fewer delays.

A total of 2,180,206 flights used UK airspace in 2004, a new annual record and an increase of 4.9 per cent on 2003. Figures show that in December 2004, NATS handled 165,045 flights, an increase of 5.3 per cent over the same period in 2003.

Despite rising traffic levels, service delivery showed significant improvement, with the average delay, per flight, attributable to NATS in 2004, falling to 25 seconds, compared to 44 seconds in 2003, a reduction of 43 per cent.

The number of flights that experienced delays attributable to NATS fell markedly. In 2004, 97.5 per cent of flights experienced no air traffic control delay, up from 95.2 per cent in 2003.

NATS Chief Executive, Paul Barron, said: "Despite record numbers of flights, NATS delivered its best performance in 2004 on record. To manage this level of traffic safely, and at the same time reducing delays, is a credit to everyone at NATS.”

The London Area Control Centre (LACC) at Swanwick, Hampshire, which handled over 1.7 million flights through 200,000 square miles of airspace above England and Wales, recorded its best performance ever in the latter part of 2004.

For a period of 24 consecutive days, between 27 November and 20 December, there were no delays to flights attributable to Swanwick and of the 133,000 flights handled in December, only 36 received a delay attributable to the centre.

Sorry to spoil your party, Minesapint, but "busy" is not only expressed in numbers of flights.
Being an ATCO, you should know, that size of airspace, amount of vertical movements and amount of time an acft is on the freq can increase (or decrease) the complexity exponentially.
Therefore big d*cks are not necessarily busier than small ones... :hmm:

Still rest my case. Take Clacton sector. The vast majority is climbig or tuther. Most of our traffic is not level for long. I do agree with what you say.

Can we close this thread now, before we get into the 'mine's busier than yours' and movements per staff figures are worked out?

Quite right !

As we all know you can work your socks off with 2 a/c or watch the world go by with 10 in a sausage machine!;)

I was just trying to identify the busiest units. If people feel threatened then by all means close it. I work at Swanwick but the busiest places I have ever worked were Binbrook CAC at Lindholme and Valley tower. Way beyond Swanwick :cool:

Lux. sector Maastricht can be naughty.

Jerricho
I`d have thought Tobago TWR would be one of the warmest places to be when the Radar is turning and burning!! For those of you that haven`t seen it the VCR is built into the radar tsupport frame so that you are sitting right under the darn thing!!

Defining busy is not easy. If we agree on the number of a/c at a given time on the frequency divided by tthose the % of those on vertical or heading evolution, then some sectors at LATCC or Maastricht score very high indeed , but..
I worked in Maastricht with 25 + on the FQ and thought that was the max achievable, until I visited some US Towers ( Chicago, Atlanta or JFK on a friday afternnon was a mind opener I can tell you ) At least on those days ( 1990 ´s) they beated us Europeans a long way.... They also got relieved every 20 minutes.