just found out the big wigs upstairs have found a way to cut training costs for new controllers.
being the majority of air traffic in the U.S. is done with radar, they are no longer going to teach non radar seperation at any of the facilities, cutting trainning time by a good 30 to 40 percent. and thus training costs.
i work traffic between miami and san juan perto rico. there are 2 radar sites, sitting on islands not owned by the U.S. that we use to controll this traffic. an average of 4 times a year one or both of those radar sites go down for various reasons from preventive maintanence to someone stealing the generator, to someone parking a crane next to it and effectively jamming it.
when it does, we use flight progress strips (paper strips) with time and position information to seperate the traffic.
this year, we just got a new computer system that eliminates the need for paper strips saving the agency a bundle of money for paper and printers and someone to man them. it displays the aircraft information electronically and allows us more versatility in manuplating the flight plan information.
it doesnt however, display time and fix information for aircraft. this system does not allow for the non radar seperation of aircraft.
of coarse we complained. their answer, allow the printers to keep printing the strips and save them in a big, unorganized pile. and when, not if, the radar goes down, sift through that big pile of strips and find the flight plan information for the aircraft in my airspace.
by the time we find all the flight plan information, and begine to cordinate that information with the next sectors the aircraft will enter without any notice unless we tell them.......those planes will be long out of our sector, and a whole new bunch of airplanes will be in our sector we know nothing about.
then.....to top it off.....
we find out the FAA is going to stop teaching non radar at all the facilities.
hahahahahahaha, i can laugh about the absurdity now because no one has died yet.
picture this, 3 years from now, when most of the experienced controllers are long gone, one of these radar sites fail....and they will......picture a controller with a blank look on his face slowly sifting through a pile of paper strips with aircraft screaming for instruction, and not having a clue about what he is supposed to do with the strips even if he does fine them all.
toss em up and let god sort them out, the moral majority working for you.