English: a controversial topic

You would be excused for thinking this is as straightforward as it can get. You enter a selection process. You prove your level of English. You get selected. You study and do your training and then you have a job with great wages and you forget about your English altogether because you’re never going to be tested again.
That was so until a few years ago. Or a few months, from our point of view. ICAO (International Civil Aviation Authority) has proved that miscommunication is a key factor in many air traffic incidents and therefore has published a document (doc 9835) and a circular (318) to do it’s best to establish minimum standards for all Air Traffic Controllers and Pilots, in order to curb this serious problem. It poses the need for all personnel to pass an exam and obtain level 4 or higher out of six. It also established a deadline which nobody took any notice of. So it has now been extended, for the last time, until 5th March 2011.
This means nothing to you native English speakers out there but it causes havoc here in Spain. We currently have ATCO’s with 30 plus years’ experience who haven’t done an English refresher in the whole of their working life. Some others have. Some practise a lot, regardless of their job. About two thousand different cases. All are now required to prove their proficiency during the next month. And beware: you lose your license if you fail!
How much English is really used on the average day at work? Not much more than numbers and descriptors to indicate runway names, speeds, headings, altitudes, rates of climb or descent, departure or landing procedure names, and company or unit names. Possibly a little more may be needed to warn of bad weather or radio interference. It seldom goes any further than that.
These are the grounds for many controllers to argue that, if they have been working for a number of years and have never been involved in an incident report regarding the use of English, why shouldn’t they be validated to continue working? Precisely the opposite reasoning goes into ICAO’s effort: many people hadn’t suffered a mishap because non-routine circumstances hadn’t cropped up. The whole English debate intends to ensure that we all are ready to affront most non-routine situations
These are also the reasons that were used by National Safety Agencies to curb the previous deadline by giving all workers a provisional level 4. That’s now until March 5th next. By then, you have to hold your certificate. All you have to do is get yourself a four, then forget the whole issue for three years. Or a five and forget it for six years. A level six will allow you to bury the bastard for ever, although you have to be practically bilingual to get one. For 2000 controllers, anything could happen. But, despite claims from the Spanish ATCO Guild that our English is excellent, it doesn’t seem that absolutely everyone will keep their license. And many are scared stiff to take the exam.
All this has caught both Aena and Spanish controllers off guard. More than a year ago some of us were offered a test exam over the phone. Just a few of us actually tried it. As far as I know, nobody got any marks. Nobody knew what it was all about. Nothing else was known for months, until suddenly we received a letter from the Human Resources Director pointing out the new deadline, and it’s consequences.
So what will Aena do to the controllers who fail their test? Basically, a six months leave with progressively diminishing pay has been offered, in order to give people time to revive their languishing English and retry the test. All studying has to be done in one’s own time, although Aena has offered an online study package. If, after this you fail, you’re fired.
Bear in mind the following situation: Controller has been at the job for 35 years, had qualified for early retirement, was deprived of that by the (probably illegal and certainly immoral) Royal Decree, but could still retire in the short future, maintaining substantial wages until full retirement and State pension. He/she fails the exam a few weeks before retirement and loses it all, without ever having been offered an English refresher. Obviously unacceptable. Our reaction has been to leave the exam until the last possible moment, just in case Aena realises that it has some duty towards it’s workers.
Even the Sinister Minister has had to speak. Facing the prospect of suddenly losing all Air Traffic Services in Spain, he has filtered a project extending the validity of our English level 4 for 18 months. As a result, we will be an ICAO exception (as in many other areas). And if all our managers and politicians continue to try to enforce unacceptable measures upon us with no negotiation we are slowly but steadily going to turn into one of the most dangerous places to fly to in the world. If we’re not there already.

Fatigue and the million dollar question.

In earlier posts I showed how we are now forced to do 40% more than other countries’ controllers, and I suppose nobody can embrace the idea of knackered controllers. After quite a while experiencing how Aena has tried to squeeze the last drop of blood out of us, after seeing how dozens of colleagues have fallen to illness (including myself), and many others work under the effect of tranquillisers or need pills to sleep at night, one wonders: Where is the limit? Surely there must be a point where it’s unfair to ask an air traffic control specialist to do any more. I feel that most readers will think that they already spend too much time and effort at their own workplace, and I cannot dispute that, but the specific responsibility of an ATCO may require specific working condition guarantees.
Each of us obviously has different capacities. Some of us can withstand less pressure than others. Politically incorrect as it may be, I need to expose what really is an obvious truth: although all controllers have passed their respective tests and have the required skills to do the job, some are better than others. Sometimes very much so. The same applies to resilience, some are tougher than others.
Our’s is a very specialised job. I don’t believe that it’s in any way more important than others in this or other fields. We’re just the end of a large chain. We could do nothing if engineeers, maintenance or cleaning weren’t running properly. Each link of the chain is as important as each other.
On the other hand, it is true that our task is delicate. We "play" directly with thousands of lives every day and therefore have to be serene, rested and show a reasonably positive attitude. We are even compelled by law to refrain from work if we’re not feeling up to it on the given day. An article of the Air Safety Law specifically addresses this (art 34.4 LSA).
The Goverment used a rationale to justify increasing our hours to 1670 (plus 80 of overtime). They said that is what we effectively did a couple of years ago, when so much overtime had been done. That would respond to a certain logic if the conditions had also been maintained. But there are many major changes. Rest within the shift has been reduced from 33 to 25%. Rostering is done only ten days in advance, instead of 90. The over 57’s were unjustifiably axed. So much so, that they were recovered six months later. Pay was reduced between 25 and over 75%, depending on the previous overtime. These and many more were measures that just added to the already extreme pressure upon ATCOs’ shoulders. Admitting a degree of subjectivity, where’s the reasonable limit? It’s very hard to establish an objective yearly limit, but I can focus on daily ones.
My own experience and subjective feeling makes me think that, under a high traffic load, the maximum continuous working limit is about an hour, probably a bit more if you mix tasks (i.e. planning/organising as well as actually controlling).
The Spanish Government has helped me to establish an objective limit, because it has published a Royal Decree on “limits to activity and rests” (RD 1001/2010 5th Aug.) last August. Instead of performing its own studies about fatigue on the workplace it decides to use comparable international legislation, and it chooses FAA (USA) and NATS (UK), as an example, because they are the amongst the most demanding and flexible, in order to allow the ANSPs to satisfy the necessary demand. Obviously, for the rest of my working career I would have preferred less demanding hours, but this has been imposed by Royal Decree, no negotiation. The law imposes a maximum limit of two consecutive hours, literally copied from SRATCOH, the UK regulation. Not only do I personally think that is too much, I’ve also observed that the Spanish ruling has “forgotten” to translate parts relating to enhanced relief, which establishes increased rest, with a maximum of 1h30min continuous activity, for high complexity workplaces, as many in Aena are. Our irresponsible legislators have also added a clause allowing Aena to delay implementation 18 months. In the meantime, we are working daily timetables of no less than three consecutive hours almost every day.
If the Spanish law states that its conditions are those necessary in order to guarantee a fatigue free environment, is it reasonable to assume that if it is not abided by, that guarantee vanishes?
To be honest with you all, I must say that I know nothing about other countries’ regulations on this topic, but I wonder why they have chosen UK and USA. Could it be because those two countries naturally have a lower fatigue load than Spain because they only use one language? Spanish is an official ICAO language and has to be used together with English every day on the radio, meaning constant register changes, and therefore a higher workload.
More about English in a future post. Thanks for reading.

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.