Delays at Sydney airport
 

Is there anywhere that you can find out WHY flights are delayed?

I'm watching a few planes now circling south of Sydney for 30-60 minutes and the company website just shows the flights as "delayed" but no reason.

Obviously its a problem with the airport, as the planes are within 10 minutes of the airport but not being allowed to land and there is only light traffic.

Pete - what can I say - welcome to the 2nd best Airport in the world:*

Probably due short staffed ATC.
Heard approach was 4 down. Long term poor staff planning.
Nothing to do with the troops.

atc problem
 

Flights around the country are being delayed or cancelled tonight because of a shortage of air traffic controllers at Sydney airport.

Some planes are being forced to circle for at least 45 minutes before landing, while many passengers on the ground are being forced to spend an extra night in Sydney.

I haven't seen 120 minutes traffic holding before into Sydney either. Perhaps there were a few St George or Para supporters among the controllers this arvo?

[ABC News]

Flights around the country are being delayed or cancelled tonight because of a shortage of air traffic controllers at Sydney airport.
Some planes are circling for at least 45 minutes before landing, while many passengers on the ground are being forced to spend an extra night in Sydney.
Air Services Australia (ASA) says three employees called in before their shifts this afternoon to say that they could not come to work.
A spokeswoman says it is not related to any industrial matters but is unable to say whether it is because they are sick or have had to take the day off for personal reasons.
She says replacements were unavailable.
A spokeswoman for Virgin Blue says there will be cancellations and delays, with some people having to be accommodated overnight.
She says planes are circling for at least 45 minutes before landing in Sydney.
Qantas says its flights have been delayed for up to an hour.
ASA says flights should be back to normal tomorrow.
Sydney airport officials have refused to comment, saying it is a problem for Air Services Australia.

NOTAM

YSSY Reclassified CTAF (R) 120.5 13090200 to PERM

CTMS 70mins and then 40mins holding!! what is going on and why do the airlines always have to be the ones who cop the passenger abuse and of course the huge costs involved. :ugh::ugh:

they were on the hill at Kogarah jubilee oval

trueline nails it

Chronic short staffing throughout the organisation evaporated the traditional internal sources of transfer into SYD TMA.

Middle management rewarded for reducing core staff below minimum requirements and filling on (ironically cheaper) overtime.

Years of warnings unheeded.

Inexplicable inability to recruit and train sufficient backfill.

Abysmal attempts at overseas recruitment direct to SYD TMA producing < 20% of required graduates.

It's only going to get worse chaps and chapettes. The few remaining controllers on their days off are generally too disenfranchised to bother covering roster shortfalls thanks to post-EBA reprisals from Canberra.

Duff man,

My understanding is most of the reprisals/reinterpretations/etc have been driven by a certain SDL manager in Melbourne who got rolled in the negotiations, not from Canberra.

Speaking to the ALMs, most realise the end effect it will have but there isn't much anyone can do when this certain SDL manager is also the de facto Centre manager. Anyone want to pitch in $20 to start a 'Bring back Hoody' fund?

On the topic, AsA can blame the controllers involved all they want. It doesn't change the fact that best staffing practice dictates that in aviation, you have spare people on standby to cover the shortfall when people do go sick. Sickness happens and if your only plan to cover it is to get people in on their day off, you will end up with service problems.

Why the rest of the aviation world does it as standard but our magnificent 'leaders' can't see that it is necessary is beyond me!

Hmmm not enough doctors, not enough judges, not enough atc, overcrowded hospitals, enormous waiting lists...


HANG ON THERE'S A TREND HERE!:ugh:

Good on VB for saying "hey that's enough!".

Three out of 10 air traffic controllers equal chaos
 

Ben Sandilands writes:
Sydney had a jet jam involving thousands of delayed travellers yesterday, both in the ground and in the terminals, just over a year after AirServices Australia promised to fix an air traffic staffing shortfall by the end of September 2008.
The essential figures are that Sydney Airport was supposed to operate on a roster of 10 air traffic controllers, but only three were available yesterday.
AirServices boasts a payroll of over 3000 staff. Why a mere six of them are considered all that are necessary for approach and departure control at such a critically important airport is almost as much a mystery as to what a large part of the staff actually do in terms of productive work.
There appear to be more media managers and image massagers than Sydney controllers on the ASA payroll. Questions asked of AirServices went unanswered this morning.
It is also a mystery why the Minister for Infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, believes anything AirServices says, including its claims last year that air traffic manning issues were really part of an industrial campaign.
There has been industrial peace in the skies since May. But the services remains undermanned according to the union, Civil Air, which has also been critical of AirServices failure to adequately train controllers for both replacement and expansion.
Nor does it represent all controllers. In the last year, air traffic control disruptions have continued across Australia because of shortages of union and non-union staff.
The president of the Civil Air union, Robert Mason, said "four out of ten of 796 controllers will retire in the next five years, and we are 100 short of the minimum needed for certainty of service today."
The inescapable truth about AirServices is that it has botched the resourcing of the service, and Albanese has been unable to find either the time or inclination within the Infrastructure super-ministry to engage with and resolve the situation.
In the delays near Sydney yesterday, airliners were assigned positions in wide ranging holding patterns to ensure they lined up in a safe order for arrivals, while departures were spaced out along routes intended to give a wide berth to the squadron of circling jets.
None of which would have been necessary when route control is handed over to approach and departure control at busy airports.
Air traffic control was invented because of the uncertainties of self separation. It is a no brainer, just like the administration of air traffic control in this country.

World's Best Practice ?

I would love to see stats on how many times delays like last Sunday's were avoided because ATCs gave up their days off to fill in. Personal experience leads me to believe there would be close to one a week (not just at SYD).

So for every time you experience delays - have a think about how many other times delays were avoided due to ridiculous amounts of overtime. If ATCs only worked their rostered 72 hour week, the massive holes in the system would soon be obvious to those outside ASA as well.

To hear idiots say that "we only need 889 ATCs and we have 960 on the books" just makes me spit. Like several years ago when the RAAF, realising that the category was almost 100 controllers under strength fixed it by simply "drawing down" CE at each base - voila, now we're fully manned! :ugh:

well said..........

Perhaps the Minister might be advised to do a bit of plane watching at YSSY rather than filling up my inbox with media releases about new signs that are [quote] "almost ready to be installed" on the
[quote] "almost completed Bruce Highway Improvements"

Might be a good time for Messrs Creedy, Sandilands & Co to scrum down and design a strategic barrage of FOI requests to ASA & the Minister's Office.

sidebar]
Speaking of airport pain - well done to the Qlink Dash drivers negotiating GLT approach which looks more like a links golf course. -

If they successfully get sued by the airlines, do you think there will be an increase in service fees and more political legal red tape? If they don't manage to recover the costs, do we suffer due to lack of improved technology and extra training for staff to keep up to date with world standards?

Who will win in a situation like that?

My personal belief for any of this to work is for the government to intervene immediately. The airlines should drop their legal action against ASA and focus on the government providing a suitable immediate outcome in the interest of safety, efficiency ( I hear Rudd talking about carbon offset?? WTF happens when you have twenty jets circling for twenty min unnecessarily) and hence maximization of revenue.

It was the government that privatized most of its sectors to gain revenue and avoid any legal retribution. They are largely to blame due to lack of regulation after privatization.

The public, the tax payers (Taxes more than airfare tickets), the airport, the airlines, the staff, should not have to suffer the fate of one immoral company for the greater good of itself.

Do you agree?.. Or am I missing something substantial in this?

Wang, the stumbling block to any solution is sourcing more controllers - there is no instant solution no matter who runs ATC. Certainly focusing on core "business" instead of playing silly management games would be a good start.

Le P, before you source more controllers, there has to be the will to do so. Do you see ANY EVIDENCE whatsoever, that AsA is interested in increasing staff numbers? From the outside, it looks suspiciously like an organisation desperately hoping that technological advances will do away with the need for staff.
Their spin doctors tell the media, right up til today (see article mentioned in this thread) that there is no staff shortage. AsA management tell their bosses (senate estimates etc.) that, alternately, there is no staff shortage and that delays are an industrial campaign/there is a staff shortage but it will be fixed by last August/that there is an 'over-reliance on overtime'!
Now, either their political masters are in on the game and couldn't care less how they spin it, or should be sacking the lying pieces of $hit.

As for Virgin taking legal action- I have been saying for ages that AsA has been cost-shifting onto the airlines for a good while with this under-staffing BS, and now they are finally waking up.

The interesting thing is that staffing in the Tower is pretty good and APP/DEP is short, yet the Tower has had (or will have) 6 trainees this year, whilst only 2 or 3 have gone to APP/DEP.
Go figure - I am sure it makes sense to someone.

"The interesting thing is that staffing in the Tower is pretty good and APP/DEP is short, yet the Tower has had (or will have) 6 trainees this year, whilst only 2 or 3 have gone to APP/DEP.
Go figure - I am sure it makes sense to someone."

Keepemseparated - is it an aptitude thing? Not saying that APP is harder than TWR or vice versa. Having been multi-rated in the RAAF I believe some people are better suited to the TWR environment, and others to APP. Some are good at both and some of course, well, I try not to fly on those days...;)

Or is it giving ASA too much credit to think that they would assign people to the environment for which they are most suited ... given that they are quite happy to take RAAFies with 10+years of TMA experience (radar environment), put 'em through an enroute short course and then stick them on procedural enroute sectors. :confused:

Vote 1 - HOODY !
 

HOODY won`t come back !
Too clever.He has carved out a niche now, fixing poorly run Aviation entities , doing the bolt and then fixing another then another !! And good on him, at least one individual actually has some managerial skill !

Like its been stated previously, the frontline personel who experience the deficiencies are ignored completely until everything turns to crap. Then the Spin Doctors arrive, juggle the figures and paint a rosey little picture for the Minister and the Media, then months later all the deceptions unravel and it turns to crap once again...
As M.Latham would once have said - 'They are a conga line of suckholes' !

Length of training required would be a large consideration - it probably takes twice as long to train on TMA than TWR. You simply can't have the same throughput.

Plus when numbers are tight it's difficult to release someone to update & run sim courses.

I don't know Ferris. It's very hard to tell from the coal face through all the obscuring spin. We're getting a number of ab initios coming through but that's barely keeping up with losses. We're still running on overtime.

You're right - management hope is pinned on assorted measures such as light traffic endorsements. And as you well know such things don't just fall from the sky, miraculously endorsing our licences. Management is more concerned with insisting we all do the "Leaders leading" presentation than providing any training.

RAAFASA, a couple of the guys are newbies and streamed for radar towers, so they could only go the tower, but the others are either experienced locals (BK) or imports (not sure of the backgrounds, but they could have been trained for either).
I think at the end of the day its about bums on seats, and to train someone in the tower you only lose a rated controller off the roster for a week or so (classroom days/visit to visual Sim in ML), whilst the app/dep training involves a much longer run in the Sim, these lessons work best with 2 trainees, therefore two app or dep controllers off the roster at the same time, which they cannot afford. Short sighted - yep.
It will get worse before it gets better, as a few of the Traffic Managers are leaving by years end and that means getting guys off of the tools to train on the SYTM role - without them the whole show stops - no app or dep!!

SY controllers have just had rec leave cancelled for the next three months 'to protect service continuity'.
They must be fully staffed.:ugh:
Wonder how they will be feeling about giving up their days off to cover the holes in the roster now?
When you know there is a 'holiday light at the end of the tunnel' you can push through. When even that is taken away to cover up years of a lack of workforce planning it gets very hard.
When will ASA management admit they have made a right royal stuff up of the last few years, and try and get the controllers onside rather than trot out spin doctors to imply that staffing is fine and it is the fault of a couple of controllers? I'm not holding my breath.
These are the games 'Corporate Relations' and ASA mangement play in the media. Controllers are too busy trying to move planes against a backdrop of artificial landing caps and a lack of staff.

Maybe they need to go on strike to prove their point(s)! It is pretty much a standard practice nowadays to get management to "do something" that they were suppose to do.

I can't decide if its petty revenge for making the manager concerned look bad, or trying to send a message to controllers in general; "do the overtime and keep things working or loose your rec leave".

This, in the same week we find out the agreed pay rise will be delayed a month, and we all have to attend a briefing on A$A's leadership program :ugh:

NB

Germany is still taking controllers. 36 shifts of holiday a year.

No leave for SY APP from Sept 19 to Dec 18. I see trouble brewing.
How do they expect to attract people to Sydney if the leave you had to apply for 14 months can be canned with 3 days notice - that is sh!t.

Staffing crisis? What staffing crisis?

Cancel recreation leave and while we`re at it cancel days off. Get some cheap demountables in the carpark so nobody need to go home. Lets face it they waste so much time travelling to and from work when they could be sleeping between shifts in the carpark.

What staffing crisis?

Next weeks agenda....toilet breaks, meal breaks, less than 4 hours at the console, leg irons.....:ugh:

"A great place to work"

ASA don't pay enough for Sydney.

Pera, for most of the guys and girls it is not about the money. It's about having to put up with the same BS all of the time and ASA having no respect for the staff.
Being blamed for airspace closures because you wanted to enjoy your day off - what a day off.
There are plenty of people who have worked more than 20 extra shifts in the last 12 months, and as a reward they don't get any leave.
Well done, what a disgrace.

And what are they going to do at the end of the 3 months when things are no different?

Geez, that went so well last time let's do it again :ugh::ugh::ugh::ugh:

exactly. Exhibit absolutely no will to change anything. Not even a plan (anymore). Spin doctor empire growing rapidly, though.

And they wonder why people don't want to work for them. (note the person on another pprune forum with minimal experience seeking advice whether after 4 yrs with AsA, they have enough experience to be hired overseas?)

delays at sydney - staff availability
 

from the AsA career in ATC webpage:

Airservices Australia - Careers - Air Traffic Controller

note the last point:

How Demanding is the Job of Air Traffic Control?

The nature of the job demands that Air Traffic Controllers be able to make quick and accurate decisions based on information regarding an aircraft's position. To this end, you must:

be confident and able to work with modern computer-based equipment;
be self-motivated and independent, yet work within a team environment;
be dedicated, professional, conscientious, confident and able to accept highlevels of personal responsibility;
possess a good understanding and a clear application of the English language; and
be prepared to work shifts on any day of the year.


says nothing about recreation leave, family life, work/life balance.....