The glorious land of golden opportunities

So you're thinking about coming to Spain to become an Air Traffic Controller? Maybe you're thinking about imparting some lessons at Senasa or the Universidad Camilo José Cela, where Air Traffic Controller lessons are available.
Be aware of what awaits you. If you work as an ATCO here, your wages or working hours, or retirement age are in the hands of the government. Literally. We used to negotiate our conditions, but a Royal Decree (contrary to the Spanish Constitution) came in giving all the power to Aena's management team. Our new bargaining "agreement" which has been imposed, is available on internet, albeit in Spanish: check it HERE
It's a well known fact that Mr Lema Devesa, Aena's Director General President, is a personal friend to Mr José Blanco, the Development Minister who signed all the new regulations that stripped us of our basic rights. So there's no logical reason to think that this wouldn't happen to you.
If you decide to work with an Air Traffic Control Academy, you might find that it isn't even certified. Therefore, there may be legal prosecution from alumni -as I understand is the case- claiming not only the return of their fees, but also compensation for misleading ads or brochures.
By the way, at this point you may wish to check the fees HERE
A colleague's daughter has decided that training in Spain is basically rubbish, and she has gone to Skyguide in Switzerland, where she does a proper 15 month course (instead of our useless 22 weeks!) and earns a decent wage instead of having to dish out fifty grand without any guarantee of work at the end.
You might be inclined to thinking that all I say is basically crap in order to defend our "privileged" position, as has been portrayed in the media, and that you could always refer to the Spanish Judiciary to solve any dispute and introduce Justice. Just check what has happened to British buyers of Spanish property, as reported in The Daily Telegraph. I hope seeing is believing: Here's the report
This sort of action by the incompetent Spanish Government is what led Spanish controllers to the anger which led to the events of the past 3rd and 4th of December, when the Spanish Government, through Aena, closed Spanish airspace to create even greater rage against Spanish ATCO's. Why?
More about that in a future post

EUROCONTROL

The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation.
The European Organisation for What?
Check their website. You will probably be amazed or surprised to see that "safety" only appears -title excepted- once on the home page of the website. I'm neither.
Eurocontrol has grown from being what it probably was initially, fifty years ago, into a pressure group from aircraft manufacturers, airline operators, indeed the industry in general and even Governments, with the purpose, first and foremost, of increasing efficiency and the new great word, "sustainability".
So, what is sustainable? Whatever makes more money. No interest whatsoever in the Safety side of the sector. That's just taken for granted. The decision makers are absolutely convinced that the appearance of new technologies such as TCAS guarantees Safety. They need to look closer into this. Meanwhile, why bother, let's move on to the ultimate goal: money making. I already wrote about fuel saving: no further comment.
I can admit I'm biased. I still can't understand why buses don't have conductors. Maybe someone can prove me wrong, but has the bus travel sector gained anything from the disappearance of conductors, apart from making more money?. Where does this lead us to?. Is everything going to veer into the so called New World Order, in which more money is going to reside in fewer hands, middle classes tend to disappear and workers will see their conditions endlessly deteriorate?
Sorry for straying off from my object: Eurocontrol. Let's remember "safety" is mentioned once.
That one time refers to Safety Management. Click on it.(Activities, bottom of page). You'll eventually find :
"support to the implementation and operation of safety management systems and application of best practices in the field of human factors".

Human factors? Do I need to believe that not a single one of the workers at Eurocontrol knew of the havoc that was created by the Spanish Government last year? How many people work at Eurocontrol? Do they think there was no Safety issue whatsoever? Or perhaps, on the other hand, they thought efficiency was being pursued and presumed it would be better to refrain from acting?
Not a single word has been uttered from Eurocontrol to defend collective bargaining of working conditions and wages, abiding of Law, compliance with regulations regarding rest time, rostering practice, and many other human factor issues which have clearly affected Safety and continue to affect efficiency in the Spanish skies.
Sadly, Eurocontrol, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, kept silent because their concern is mainly making sure everything remains efficient.
Prove me wrong. Maybe Eurocontrol spoke to my deaf ears. Send me the links or articles published by Eurocontrol to defend their safety culture in Spain last year. I really hope you can.

Feeling ill and the doctor's responsibility

Everyone has a bad day from time to time. I wasn’t feeling very well when I went to work today, afternoon shift. I went nevertheless, but was a bit blocked and stuffy. I usually have about one or two days like this per year, and frequently it’s on my day off.
Normally I would have an aspirin (in fact I did before leaving home) and just work through it. But during this last year I’ve seen too many incidents to be working without being 100% fit. And you must consider that in my current situation I’m not even the last person responsible for my sector, because I’me undergoing instruction in order to recover my validation after a long leave.
So, I decided to go to the workplace doctor. She’s upstairs from the operations room, less than a minute. I explained that I wasn’t feeling tiptop and she answered that she needed objective parameters. Temperature wasn’t too high, 37,2; and a visible sore throat wasn’t enough. So I had a chat and I tried to convey that the only real way to guarantee maximum safety is to make sure people who are not feeling fit on the day don’t get to work at their sector. It’s a very complicated issue, and once again the debate is upon the limits. The doctor admitted to not being able to know objectively if I had a headache or not. I didn’t, and I really just thought I should be relieved based upon not feeling very well, nothing else.
It turns out that the doctor doesn’t know what an airprox is. (You’ll excuse me for not knowing English jargon for that: literal translations from Spanish are crushing, sanding, or shoving). She has never been in the operations room. She doesn’t have a clue what our job is about. I assumed the doctors are pressurised upon to give as few leaves as possible. She denied it. Finally I stated my opinion that not everything could or should be objective: if a controller isn’t feeling fit, he/she should refrain. There are rules and fines for faking illness, but what about a headache, your dog died last night, or you exceeded yourself in the jogging and you’re sugar’s running low?. These can’t be judged objectively by simple visual examination by a doctor. But they are limiting conditions. So how should it work, because, on the other hand, I admit we can’t have workers pulling out ill whenever they want a day off (although this is a lesser evil).
In the end, the only way to organise this is to base the employer/employee relationship on confidence and good will. And throw in a couple more controllers than are needed in the shift, just in case.
By the way, I finally had high blood pressure, so I did leave for home. The doctor had to fill in five sheets of paperwork (isn’t that pressure against the leave?) and if I want my report –which I will- I have to go through a rigmarole involving the operations room Head and the Human Resources department. And I’ll get my report in a couple of days!
If you’re a controller from abroad, let me know how you do it. In comments below or to simon.a.rance@gmail.com. Thanks

Why and how so much overtime?

In my last post I published Eurocontrols numbers for yearly working hours at different Air Navigation Service Providers. Spanish ATCOs were required to work about 40% more hours than other providers. I believe that this was one of the first steps taken in order to destroy our profession and bust our Union.
Just to prove the point let me tell you how rostering works (at least in Spain). You are not allowed to adjoin two shifts operating with real air traffic, but you may do a simulator session, as a trainee or an instructor, just before or after a real traffic shift. Thus it was perfectly possible to do a morning shift, afternoon simulator, night shift, morning simulator and afternoon shift in direct succession. This is obviously unreasonable and no-one really wanted to do it. That's why overtime hours' pay rose to a very high amount.
What almost nobody knows is that Aena imposed a double condition in order to earn that overtime: you could only work in the simulator if you had previously worked in the operations room, and you could only do overtime in the operations room if you has previously worked in the simulator. This is so extreme that there is no written evidence to prove it but I personally assure you it's true. I got to hear it when I was learning and practising the new airspace for the Madrid TMA (Terminal Manoeuvring Area). Aena was very intent on it getting through quickly. We then thought we were doing everyone: Aena, Government, Citizens, a huge favour. Now I believe that we were innocent victims of the first step of a huge image campaign which has ended in the demonisation of a group of workers to achieve a goal.
What's the goal, I hear you ask! My guess might be slightly better than yours, but I feel it's just trying to offer the best possible situation for a private buyer to invest heavily in the company and it's airports. In fact, privatisation is on it's way. The ruling (a decree again) that puts 13 airports on the marketplace, was published in December.
Hurry! they're cheap now, and Spain may have a reasonable future in the mid term run.Right now a few airports that have been completed in the last couple of years (case of Castellón and Ciudad Real) are bankrupt.
Mismanagement?
More about Ciudad Real and/or what happened on the 3rd December in my next post. Thanks for reading!

OVERVIEW OF SPANISH CONTROLLERS' SITUATION

...INCLUDING SOME TRUTHS.

First of all, it's fair to state that most of the numbers reported belong to a time which now seems very long extinct. Our previous conditions, however good they may have seemed, were freely negotiated between our union Usca and Aena, our employer. Admittedly overwhelming amounts of overtime were necessary mainly because there is, in Spain as in most countries around the world, an extreme shortage of air traffic controllers (ATCO's). The salaries which have been profusely aired by the Spanish Government and Aena's spokespersons belong to that period, before 2009. I don't personally know anyone earning in excess of 900.000 euro, but on my own accounts, to earn such a salary a controller would have had to work a highly improbable more than 450 shifts that year. Admittedly, we did earn a lot (myself over 300.000 € before tax; I am a supervisor in the Madrid Terminal area, therefore on the uppermost rungs of the salary ladder). Many ATCO's decided, nevertheless, not to do any overtime at all and worked the agreed basic workload of 1200 hrs per year.
Almost all public communicators (politicians and Aena's managers) in Spain say 1200 was a very low workload. So just to give you a basic picture of what this means, here are the total number of effective hours per ATCO as have been reported by Eurocontrol for similar countries, corresponding to 2008, the latest year published, -and this includes overtime-: Italy 1506, France 1303, United Kingdom, 1268 and Germany 1123.
(Eurocontrol ATM cost-effectiveness report 2008, page 124, available on the internet: divide total number of working hours between workers).
On the end of the scale is Spain, with an average of 1786 hours per ATCO. Considering many controllers worked 1200 hours or less, many others worked double shifts. Personally I think there could have been a safety issue, but that is another matter. To illustrate how extreme the need was, controllers in Madrid had a basic roster of 16 shifts per month. A further 14 were scheduled as "structural overtime", and further volunteer overtime was done on top of that. It was a time when we were required to do lots of training in order to open new sectors, or runways, as in Madrid. And there was a rush to stage opening acts before elections. Furthermore; if we failed to work then, we would have been accused of interfering with the citizens' right to travel freely. I have copies of the rosters to prove the overtime done.
Our low productivity has also been one of the government's communication milestones: we control fewer aircraft per hour than UK's controllers, they say. True. Spanish airspace has a few peculiarities. Some parts of the upper airspace are obviously not as dense as most of the British airspace. Should we control them or not? If we decide to control them, controllers will be needed, and their productivity will necessarily be lower than their counterparts'. In a similar manner, Spain has a peculiar administration system. The State is divided into 17 Autonomous Communities: some more densely populated than others. Their respective governments support the State Government when required at National Parliament, and "pay back" favours. And they all want to have their own airport, regardless of whether there are passengers to use them reasonably or not. Consequently, some of the network's airports have one flight on alternate days, or around 300 passengers per year.
The previous working conditions were completely overhauled by a Royal Decree Law on 5th February 2010 (which you may find on the State Official Bulletin, Boletín Oficial del Estado www.boe.es ). Firstly, the Spanish Constitution (Carta Magna) clearly specifies that collective bargaining agreements are "specially protected" and should not be subject to regulation via Royal Decree. And the degree of interference in previous agreements has been devastating.
The basic object of the Royal Decree was to establish a new yearly timetable of 1750 basic hours, thus axing overtime altogether. In an imaginative interpretation, the resulting 1750 are payed at the same total price as the previous 1200. With one additional detail: Aena failed to comply with commitments made upon the collective bargaining table, and didn't declare their new pay obligation to CECIR (the Interministerial Retributions Committee) . Therefore, the resulting pay is lower than the previous basic salary, posing problems for controllers to pay their regular monthly bills. Amidst global crisis -particularly bad in Spain- controllers still have a tough time selling off assets to adjust to the new situation. So now the Spanish mass media still say average pay is 200.000 whereas there isn't a single operational controller in Spain earning that amount, even if before taxes data are considered.
Further consequences of the Royal Decree were that many other rights were slashed. On call duties were introduced into the system, and, as even that wasn't enough to cover the demand, COS (Obligatory Service Coverage) shifts were also tossed in. The final result of this is that Spanish ATCO's have no dependable free time. Any day off could be suddenly eliminated. Rosters, previously published 90 days beforehand, were now handed out with just 10 days' previous advice. Vacations, two months instead of being confirmed in October of the previous year. A whole batch of measures devised to make family life planning impossible.
The previous situation included an option of early retirement for controllers over 52 (with 30 years' experience) or 55 years of age (as admitted by ICAO). In The US , 56 is a compulsory retirement age, and in Europe it is between 55 and 60 in many countries. Spain allowed controllers to continue work until 65 if they felt like doing so and passed the compulsory medical checks (which cover eyesight and hearing, but not stress coping or decision making agility). It seemed a reasonable agreement whereby one decided whether he/she was in good order to carry on working. The new Royal Decree cancelled early retirement for everyone. On one hand that made 52 year olds stay. But it also forced unwilling 62 year olds to continue until the age of 65.
In a later regulation, to cover up this tremendous mistake, all 57 year olds and over were declared unoperational, thus leaving certain workplaces, notably the Madrid Terminal Area, deeply understaffed. As a consequence of the whole situation, at least 11 A type airproxes (real collision risk) have been reported in the first half of 2010, compared to only two in the previous year. Controllers have had to increase spacing between aircraft to compensate for the terrible psychological and physical state they are working in.
Realising the new mistake, all 57s and over were requested to return to work six months and a few days' later. After six month's of not making use of their license, hay have to be retrained. Most are still at it.
Professional excellence.
Aena is adamant on the fact that no new air traffic controllers are needed. But in some workplaces (such as Madrid, where I work), most ATCO's have had no refresher, or English, or emergency training whatsoever in the last two years. This is unacceptable in Air Traffic Control. Even new procedures have been imposed under this regime. Some controllers had read circular letters that were dispersed in the operations room; some others hadn't. Different people working with different rules in the same airspace. Why no refreshers? Simply because there's no spare time in the controllers' already overloaded timetables to do anything apart from productive aircraft separation.
There is a privatization operation underlying, and the Spanish State needs to sell off parts of it's Air Navigation Business. So far so good. But in order to do so, they need to destroy any kind of trade unionism, because the ultimate object is to create "low-cost" controllers, for the privatized part. To illustrate this point, all air traffic controllers currently working in Spain are University degree holders who have passed a tough selection process involving several tough psychometric tests plus English interviews and exams. The normal ratio was around 8000 applicants for 200 posts awarded in order to complete a 15 to 18 month course. This seemed a reasonable selection. The current system involves the new applicants paying 45.000 euros for a 22 week course in a private University (check the Senasa webpage). How this will work in the future has still to be seen.
The latest move has been the declaration of the State of Alarm by the Government, conveying the message that they are incapable of negotiation. Many law experts in Spain say that both this new Royal Decree and the subsequent mobilization (militarization) decree are illegal moves. These followed a yet further decree by which some of the few remaining rights were also removed. Amongst them the right to have free leave days for circumstances such as illness, next to kin's illness, maternity, or many others. A new accountancy system establishes a " de facto" workload of almost 2000 yearly hours. No further comments are needed.
The next day I'll explain why so many hours were required and how Air traffic controllers could choose between two conditions: guilty of earning too much money or guilty of blackmailing travelers.

Afer all this, the current situation is a group of 2000 air traffic controllers who are working under the the effects of tranquilizers and sleeping pills. With soldiers behind them. People who start crying with no apparent reason when least expected. Controllers are absolutely knackered and we can't even resort to article 34.4 of the Navigation Law which clearly states that we should refrain from work unless in perfect physical or mental order.
As for Safety? Judge for yourselves.