airtraffic

Author Topic: What Is More Difficult?  (Read 8655 times)

Offline JALTO

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What Is More Difficult?
« on: June 01, 2007, 03:47:49 PM »
I was wondering because ATC is such a dynamic job in regards to the weather, time of day, time of year, etc... what is more difficult for a controller of these scenarios:

a. Peak traffic time of day with commercial and GA traffic to guide (lots of planes up at once)

or

b. Peak traffic time of day but with bad weather conditions and ATC gate holds/delays etc. (Rwy swap, holds, last minute vectors for storms) 

In listening to the feeds I can not determine what seems to be more stressfull to the controllers.  This may also be different from controller to controller but I just wanted to throw the question out there.

Thanks,

-J



Offline KSYR-pjr

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #1 on: June 01, 2007, 05:31:19 PM »
a. Peak traffic time of day with commercial and GA traffic to guide (lots of planes up at once)

or

b. Peak traffic time of day but with bad weather conditions and ATC gate holds/delays etc. (Rwy swap, holds, last minute vectors for storms) 

Well, I am not a controller but given the above two choices it should be quite obvious based on a logical point of view.  Option B is option A but with an additional twist of having bad weather and all that it brings to the mix.  Therefore there can only be one answer:  Option B.

:)

Offline KSYR-pjr

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #2 on: June 01, 2007, 05:35:19 PM »
I should expand on my previous reply by stating that a controller who cannot adequately handle option A without stressing out certainly would not be able to handle option B.

Offline JALTO

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #3 on: June 01, 2007, 07:04:58 PM »
Lets say option B has less planes to handle cause they are stuck at the gate but more elements to deal with like weather and changing runways other centers not taking handoffs etc....


Offline tyketto

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #4 on: June 01, 2007, 09:19:04 PM »
Lets say option B has less planes to handle cause they are stuck at the gate but more elements to deal with like weather and changing runways other centers not taking handoffs etc....



It's still a bit relational, as runways can change at any time, especially if needed to take advantage of any phenomena.

Today, for instance. KLAS, in what looks to be normal weather for us, changed runway configs at least 3 times, and in is still in its 3rd (and most unusual) runway configuration. Winds are basically calm, but because of density altitude, they are using the most unused configuration (landing 7R, 19L, 19R, departing 7L). Most times unless winds don't allow, they'll land 19s/25s.

So it all depends on how the controller is able to adapt to the conditions at hand to be able to tell which situation is harder to handle.

BL.

Offline Casper87

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #5 on: June 02, 2007, 12:50:26 PM »
Not a very specific question as it depends on the sector/airport and the airspace as wll as many other factor...but in a few words:

A quick answer I would give is your option A, a busy mixture of traffic is always difficult to deal with because of the different flight rules, speeds, wake vortex catagories etc.....

Also with B, if you said specificaly bad weather, then the traffic levels will be lower due to the lack of VFR and GA traffic but of course LowVis operations require a lot of thought and planning.

Offline davolijj

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #6 on: June 02, 2007, 04:37:16 PM »
At the center level weather adds the most complexity to the controller's workload.  It's important to know what Enroute aircraft are going to do in order to use certain separation methods.  When aircraft are all deviating you start to run out of "outs" and can't always work the traffic the way you'd prefer.  Plus the amount of coordination is increased when aircraft are deviating due to weather.

Offline sierra yankee

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #7 on: June 02, 2007, 07:26:18 PM »
B without question.

Volume is predictable and is taken into account in airspace and sector planning.  There are dedicated arrival and departure corridors, sectorization and subsectorization based on routes and altitudes, and flow control initiatives that can see volume delays and chokepoints in advance and mitigate the problems before they happen.  Standard procedures are implemented to reduce coordination requirements between sectors.  Staffing can also be adjusted (more sectors opened etc.) to deal with it.  Finally, since most control centres see a "rush" at least once a day, if not more, controllers get pretty good at handling them and after awhile it's almost unthinking.

When weather rolls through a sector, all of these things go out the window.  Dedicated departure and arrival corridors no longer apply because there's often just one "hole" and everybody wants to go right through it.  I've seen aircraft depart Toronto and not get climbed above 7,000 until they're 75 miles out because they were going right into the teeth of all the arrivals and there was no way for them to get higher.  All kinds of aircraft that we'd climb and descend "through" each other on a normal day, because their flight-planned routings don't come within 50 miles of each other laterally, are all of a sudden deviating right into each other.  Weather doesn't respect sector boundaries, so you end up with a million pointouts -- there have been times when I've been taking 6 or 7 hotline calls PER MINUTE from six different adjacent sectors, in addition to talking to the actual aircraft.   Sometimes an adjacent sector gets completely weathered in and all of a sudden you see aircraft flashing at you on which you have no estimates, no strips, you've never heard of them, but they're heading into your airspace and you have to work them because they have nowhere else to go.  When that happens with aircraft that normally route through the USA only (I'm in Canada), you don't even see a callsign, just a "splat" with a squawk code and altitude.  They haven't been entered into the Canadian flight data processing system because their routing as planned wasn't supposed to touch Canadian airspace, so we don't know who they are or where they're going.  The data guy ends up going crazy trying to type in "shell" flight plans so that we can at least keep track of who's who.

Because weather systems can move so quickly, you end up basically rewriting the procedure manual about once every 10 minutes -- it's not even a case of "there's a storm over XYZ so let's route guys around it."  As well, every aircraft going through the same weather is going to deviate differently -- some just take a little turn around the absolute worst stuff (active thunderstorm areas), some will go 100 miles out of their way to avoid any buildups.  Sometimes there's a certain altitude (usually only with minor or developing storms) above which aircraft can stay out of the weather, so you have some guys that appear to be going right through it while others are going around it.  This makes it very difficult to perform tasks like sequencing that are normally a pretty simple matter of assigning speeds and direct routings to keep an orderly flow.

Weather is resistant to extra staffing, because you can only break up airspace laterally or vertically, and if everybody wants to go through the same small hole, and often within a narrow band of altitudes, it doesn't really help to add people to work the airspace above or beside the problem area.  Almost inevitably you end up with a few guys going absolutely crazy (their sectors have the holes that everybody's trying to hit) and a few guys sitting on their hands (their airspace is completely blocked off).  Of course since the systems move so quickly, as above, half an hour later the latter guys are choked with traffic and the ones who were busy before are now weathered in and sending their traffic to the adjacent sectors.

When you are just busy with a lot of traffic, pilots know it, and tend to keep the readbacks and requests short and to the point.  They know what they can expect in terms of crossing restrictions, speed assignments, possible short "flow holds" etc. and they don't bitch you out or try to tell their life stories (usually).  When there's weather, however, pilots are going to be calling you every 10 seconds to report the latest conditions (since they are supposed to advise you of their deviations) and the frequency gets clogged very quickly.  When you are working a sector with a lot of arrivals and the terminal cuts you off, it's often unclear as to when you will be able to send aircraft in again (it depends on the intensity of the storm and how quickly it moves through the area, which usually can't be predicted much in advance), so you are assigning more or less indefinite holds and this makes pilots concerned.  They want to know when they can expect to go in because they need to figure out how long their fuel's going to last and how long they can wait before going to their alternate -- there's no way for you to know exactly how long it's going to be, because even if you know the storm will probably have rolled through in 20 minutes, you don't know what kind of flow control is going to be put in place once you're allowed to send guys in again.  Often it's something like 5 minutes in trail between arrivals, so if you have 8 guys holding, the last one will still be waiting for 40 minutes after things open up again.  In many cases aircraft just don't have the fuel to hang around that long, but for obvious reasons will want to wait as long as they can before pooching the passengers by going somewhere else.   Sometimes the alternate is weathered in as well and they start asking about where else they can go.  Either way, you often end up making up new flight plans along the way and it becomes a whole new task to pull these guys out of the hold, coordinate with adjacent sectors and get them around the weather and to someplace where they can land now.

That's weather in a nutshell.  I would say every single one of my top ten busiest/most "crazy" times in ATC has involved weather and reroutes to some degree.  Handling these types of situations requires a LOT of skill and creativity that you don't need on an everyday basis when things are more structured.  I don't know if this helps, or is too technical and detailed, but I'm happy to try to answer any questions based on my fairly limited experience.

Offline w0x0f

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #8 on: June 03, 2007, 02:41:15 AM »
B

Offline LHP50

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #9 on: June 04, 2007, 12:44:15 PM »
I am a controller.  Things I can't control are what cause me stress.  I can't control weather.  Therefore, option B.

Offline MikeA

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #10 on: June 04, 2007, 09:29:17 PM »
I would say B.  Bad weather and peak time of day for traffic don't mix.

Offline digger

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #11 on: June 04, 2007, 10:13:13 PM »
And the LiveATC award for concise, succinct, brief, to-the-point, devoid of extraneous superfluousness, communication goes to....

B

 :-D

Offline w0x0f

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Re: What Is More Difficult?
« Reply #12 on: June 05, 2007, 01:06:30 AM »
TY 

 :wink:

w0x0f