Featured: Neil Hansford is aviation expert with 30 years experience, having worked with airlines around the globe.<\/p>\n
In a statement provided to The World Today, Scott Nugent, President of the air traffic controllers union, Civil Air Australia, said:<\/p>\n
Civil Air represents 85% of Australia’s Air Traffic Controllers and has been doing so since 1948. The importance of our representation is commensurate with the importance of the role our members undertake. We represent our members strongly and do not apologise for doing so. Any suggestion however, that the short staffing at Airservices Australia has anything to do with Civil Air, whether “militant” or not, is fanciful.<\/p>\n
Over recent years, Air Traffic Controllers have worked in a very difficult, high pressure, short staffed environment. Our members do everything they can to ensure that safety is maintained. Controllers can only do so much, and a suggestion that their current efforts represent “low productivity” could only be made by someone who did not understand what Air Traffic Controllers do, or understand the safety implications if they get it wrong.<\/p>\n
Fatigue management rules are critically important safety mechanisms. International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) guidance says that Air Traffic Controllers globally should work, as a maximum limit, 2 hours on position, before having a 30 minute break. Whilst fatigue management is more complex and nuanced than this rule only, it is correct that Controllers generally will take a minimum 30 minute break after 2 hours of duty. This is an important tool to ensure that the mental fatigue of the role is considered and that Controllers can be their best whilst undertaking safety sensitive work, with hundreds if not thousands of lives in their hands at any one time.<\/p>\n
When there are issues such as short staffing, spacing between aircraft is increased to ensure safety. For example, if 1 Controller needs to do the work that would normally be done by 2 Controllers, spacing between aircraft may be doubled to ensure that workload is manageable and safety is maintained. Any suggestion to try and maintain regular throughput whilst short staffed is completely against the core principles of safety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Featured: Neil Hansford is aviation expert with 30 years experience, having worked with airlines around the globe. In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[13986,2805,11630,13876,247,5769],"class_list":["post-69016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sydney","tag-airlines","tag-airport","tag-aviation","tag-podcast","tag-sydney","tag-sydney-airport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}