RE: Risk Takers?
[quote]ORIGINAL: Hossfly
Maybe you were not into ATC when the first arrival routings were brought into play, followed by the canned departure routes. These ATC Rules are made for one reason only and that is for the lowest denominator ATC controller. They definitely impede arrivals and departures, creating untold airline delays when some Thunder-Bumps are moving through. Controllers have no real authority to route aircraft off the canned routings and through the great amount of available airspace. (I was flying jets when we went all over the country VFR-OT at ALL altitudes.) So that routing/sector gets shut down and up-line machines hold at the gate. Total waste of time, fuel, and scheduling.
Hossfly,
When weather runs from Austin to Chicago and every transcontinental flight makes the end run over San Antonio, I can't speak to 500 planes at once. About 40 is the limit. That means it will take nearly 4 hours for everyone to pass through. There is barely time to say hello and good bye. No one has time to re-issue routings. So you sit at the gate in Atlanta waiting for your turn to talk to me. Canada won't take you and niether will Monterey .Remember, the system is a manual one. Airspace isn't the issue. The issue is how fast can barney speak. Thats right. The limiting factor in the NAS's capacity is communication.
What is even worse, all of those planes, no matter how screwed up thier schedule, must be in position for the next morning. So I (and all of those flight crews ) get to work late putting them where they belong.
Sids and Stars, although admittidly somewhat rediculous, reduce the airborne conflicts and communications allowing more aircraft to fly at once. They don't cause delays. They actually reduce them.
Airlines are now partners with the FAA command center and vote on weather re-route swaps and delays. Crews often complain that they don't have the fuel to fly the route that their company filed. Oh well, what is your alternate ?
We are working 4 times the planes with 5000 less controllers than in 1981. The end result will be delays. And yet the airlines do not opt for larger transports, but much smaller regional jets which increases conjestion more.
A common sinario. An airport can accept 240 arrivals per hour, but the airline that hubs there has 300 arrivals scheduled at noon. 60 flights will be late. It isn't the FAA's fault. It is the airline's fault. They know the airports capacity, they just ignore it.
The FAA tries to make it work so they use ground delays to stretch the arrivals out. Who looks like the bad guy ? The FAA for delaying a departure? Or the airline that knew all along that the schedule exceeded the airport ?
So things aren't always as they seem or as they are first presented to the public. One captain told me that maitainence could pull both wings off the plane. He could be sitting in a tube at the gate and would still tell the passengers that the delay was ATC and not the airline.
I don't know who sold the club on the idea that a low pass was dangerous either. But I can see how your analogy is relevant.