Way to go shadowrelmFollow

this situation goes on in EVERY ATC facility. it is shift work. you start with 2 evening shifts, then one mid day shift, then either 2 day shifts or one day shift followed by a midnight shift.

shift compression has been the focus of many studies as a factor in increased fatigue. professions like the fire departmant and police have an assigned 5 day midnight shift for the whole week.

toss in this addministraitions focus on doing more with less, and the second controller that SHOULD have been there, or the supervisor who SHOULD have been doing the paperwork instead of the controller......viola, one over tired controller with assigned work that takes him away from his job to do paperwork and no back up. do more with less, the new FAA motto.

we just finnished implementing a new computer system that decreases the workload of the radar associate position (the back up controller who is the second set of eyes) so "theoretically" the back up controller can spend more time watching traffic with the controller. the result is, as we are cronically shortstaffed nationwide, the radar controller can now do his primary function (seperateing traffic) and more effectively do the radar associate positions work as well without having the second controller plugged in.

this right on the heels of cancelling the "data link" system designed to actually decrease the workload of the radar controller. a system that was in the finale test phase when Bush came to office and appointed the wench with "a new plan" for the FAA.

do more with less.

the data link system was an expense that didnt affect manpower, by by. the new "urets" system reduced manpower by making the radar associate position less necessary, hello. never mind increasing safety, its all about doing more with less.

any and every time you have any type of accident in the FAA, it is the result of more than one mistake. it is usually a combination of mistakes made by two or more people. the ATC system, like the military, relies on having several layers of protection. redundancy in eveyr thing from radar, to communications, to the number of people involved in any controll action.

the mistakes are made every day quite frequintly, but 99 percent of the time the redundancy built into the system catches it and corrects it before it becomes an issue.

when you start stripping away those layers of extra protection, more and more mistakes are going to go uncorrected. end of story. this is not going to get better, and this is not going to be a one time thing. it is going to get progressivly worse untill the head of this agency changes the "do more with less" stratagy and moves back to a "safety first" stratagy.

we need more people watching for mistakes. we needed them 5 years ago. we dont have them. we need equipment designed to decrease the workload of the radar controller, not the radar associate. we need more management level staffing to maximize the airspace to make moving traffic more effective, tey have all but been eliminated. our airspace team has been reduced from a staff of 6 to a staff of...one...

the list goes on and on. it will get worse and worse untill our very own "brownie" gets booted out of yet another safety related field handed to someone without a clue.

this is not the first stress crack to hit the fan in the last 3 years, it is the worst however.

the moral majority working HARD for you....