Real Ops night at Stansted

On Sunday night the Essex Team staged a "real ops" night at Stansted. See http://www.essex-rts.org/events/intro.php The real world airline schedules were used to create flights for the pilots to fly, and for four hours it felt like the whole world was visting Stansted.

The Essex RTS members staffed all the ATC positions at Stansted and Luton over two shifts. I took second shift on Essex Radar. It was busy! Not as chaotic as my exam as there was no emergency to deal with, but a better range of traffic coming in from both ABBOT (to the east) and Barkway (to the west), so that the two streams of traffic had to be mixed before aiming them down the narrow corridor to runway 05. Adding in some arrivals to Luton having to be vectored from the east across the arrivals to Stansted coming in from the west meant some judicious use of levels and speeds.

Another advantage over the exam was having Stansted Director being responsible for the final approach onto the ILS. At least once I'd got them pointing in his direction I could hand them over and forget about them. I only gave him one particularly bad tangle to sort out. My excuse was that voice communications were really slow - it was taking up to 30 seconds for readbacks to come through, which slowed up the speed at which instructions could be issued.

My thanks to the Essex Gang for setting all this up - researching and writing the flight plans, developing the bookings page for the website, general organisation, and of course controlling on the night. I'm not listing any names because I'm bound to insult someone by forgetting to put their name in. A great night, and a lot to be learnt ready for the next one!