Traffic Regulations

I am aware that most of my readers are aviation specialists, but some are not. Therefore I apologise for some layman explanations I sometimes prefer to make.
Air traffic control basically is no more than the surveillance of traffic flow to ensure that safety is always guaranteed along the flight path. National airspaces are covered by different companies (ANSPs), usually just one per country. Then they are divided into different regions (FIR, Flight Information Regions). Each one of these is usually managed from one workplace (Control Centre), which, in turn, is subdivided into different sectors, each one managed by one team of controllers, comprising from one to three ATCOs. Sometimes (in low traffic periods, such as night-times) these sectors are merged, forming a new sector, with a different name.
Each sector (or resulting sector) has a declared maximum overall capacity, which has theoretically been determined through workload studies, considering optimum conditions. When being licensed, controllers train in a simulator that reproduces the normal traffic flow. The trainees commence with a low traffic exercise and increase their skill by increasing traffic until the maximum capacity (or even further in simulators) and then contingencies are introduced). These could be anything from a radio failure to aircraft in an emergency, bad weather, ash clouds, malfunctioning equipment such as radar or radio beacons, etc. It could also be industrial action or, even fatigued ATCOs.
Controllers are not endorsed until they prove they can manage any situation that could crop up. As you may have guessed, many of these contingencies would reduce the maximum capacity of any given sector where real traffic is concerned.
That’s where regulations enter the picture. Obviously a traffic in emergency (as the name suggest) appears suddenly, and controllers have to improvise. If proper training has been undertaken, improvisation will be kept to a minimum.
But poor weather can usually be forecast, and therefore measures can be taken to reduce sector capacity. These will involve delaying take-off times or modifying flight plan levels or even routes. These are the so called regulations. They can also apply in conjuction with other circumstances (on the job training, illness, equipment failure…)
The local Flow management unit works closely together with Eurocontrol Central Flow Management Unit. Sophisticated computers calculate how each glitch in different airspaces affects any given flight, and calculates, with amazing precision, how much traffic will affect certain sector at a given time.
Where I work, in Madrid, the local flow management unit is situated in a corner of the operations room, and supervisors and the head can easily access the data (workload patterns) that flow management officers have at their disposal. But that is about to be a thing of the past.
Te flow unit is going to be removed from the operations room, to complicate matters for supervisors and controllers, to make it harder to regulate when the weather gets tough, to avoid controllers being aware of their impending workload. Once again, Efficiency before Safety.
Sadly, even considering that Spain has a pretty poor aviation safety record, the authorities can afford loss of lives, but not of money. Even so, they’re mucking it all up, as I will show in my next post.