Quote from: Clay Brock on May 04, 2018, 10:25:25 PM

Here is a time lapse of my flight analysis. It starts overhead the JHAWK intersection on the edge of the MCI TRACON at 8:15PM, and ends at 9:45PM. The video was compressed 128x in the sim, and an additional 8x in post editing. The total time from JHAWK to touchdown was about 1hr and 30mins

Link to time lapse: https://gyazo.com/b466bd2660d6f91c3aaac6af76fc4dd5

Nice little time lapse!

I noticed on VATSPY at one point I counted 51 arrivals in a 30 minute period. Real world AAR rate for that airport is 52/hr. So basically the airport saw double the capacity of what it can handle in the RW.

You might want to check your math. If you got 51 arrivals in 30 minutes and then none in the following 30 minutes, you’ve achieved a total arrival rate of 51. If you had 51 arrivals in both periods, then it would be double the real world rate. It’s a small discrepancy but worth mentioning.

It's important to remember that TMU is a process, not just a function. It takes planning, familiarity of airspace, open lines of communication, and collaboration. I remember for the PHL FNO a few months back, I was TMU for that event, I made sure to be cognizant of what could go wrong before it actually hit us.

The constraining factors for this event were staffing levels and high anticipated volume. I anticipated two possible scenarios and proposed workarounds to their constraints. Here's the first possible scenario:



This scenario features heavy ZBW flow on J121 in combination with high DC Metro (PCT) volume. The solutions were pretty straightforward: (1) BOS ground stop for 1 hour and then a PCT ground stop about 15 minutes after, to end at the same time as the BOS one to stabilize demand; or (2) extensive MIT with ZNY, ZDC, and ZBW.

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This is the 2nd scenario and it actually came to fruition:



Here, we have heavy ATL volume with little room to accommodate flows from ZOB or ZNY66 (flights from/through ZBW). Unfortunately, there is little coordination we do with ZTL (a major pitfall for ZNY since there's so much traffic between the 2 ARTCCs) so we would have to heavily rely on ZDC. The best possible action would have been an ATL ground stop for no more than an hour to clear the airspace and reaccommodate capacity to allow for that flow. Once it was released, we would implement MIT for ZDC overflights landing PHL (i.e., the ATL departures). Option 2 was to stop DC Metro departures and place ZBW on CFR with ZNY_TMU in order to optimize the arrival streams. The last option was to reroute aircraft through ZOB (which we ended up doing) to help out ZDC with the MIT. This required coordination with ZDC, ZTL, ZID, ZOB, and ZNY and was the least desirable option; we only used it because we were unable to get ATL to give us the ~40 MIT we needed to accommodate other arrival streams in time.

Sometimes what we do in New York is Call-for-Release (CFR). If I’m the TMU for the event, I’ll usually be asking ZBW—or at the very least, BOS—for CFR for all flights coming to the designated airport. That way, I can look for appropriate gaps in enroute/arrival flow to fit in aircraft. Downstream centers can do this too; for instance, often times we get a heavy arrival stream from ATL at some point during the event. ZTL is a tier 2 center and admittedly, we have very little infrastructure to communicate with them so we ask ZDC to have them either provide MIT, reroutes, or ideally, CFR to either our TRACON, Center, or just between them (ZTL to ZDC).

Additionally, we have implemented CFR for ZOB and CZY, where Toronto traffic is heavy.

CFR is pretty much as close as we can get to using all available arrival capacity efficiently without creating excessive delay through ground stops and holding. All that has to happen is the tower calls either an enroute controller or the TMU requesting CFR and asks for a release time. They have 2 minutes before the time and 1 minute after the time to release that aircraft or else they will have to ask for another time.

Alternatively, if you know the demand before an event (like through signups where you have a flight list), you can construct a ground delay program to schedule aircraft. This is the most effective method of controlling your arrival rate because it restricts it to a certain number. You break each hour into segments and schedule aircraft to each block leaving a certain number of slots empty to account for unscheduled traffic (pop ups). Unfortunately, while often being the most effective method of controlling your arrival rate, it is the most time consuming and relies on a high level of controller-controller and controller-pilot cooperation and rarely ever suits events in VATSIM due to the lack of that cooperation.

Finally, for short term periods of excess demand, a ground stop is usually sufficient. The scope is important here and must be determined before implementing the GS. If there is excess demand for MSP and much of the future traffic isn’t airborne yet and originated from ORD, MDW, and MCI, then a tier 1 ground stop would suffice. If you have a heavy arrival stream from DEN and there are 28 more departures not yet airborne, bound to MSP, then a single-airport (for DEN) is all that’s needed and anything more than that would generate excess delay. If there is excess demand from many ARTCCs, all scheduled into MSP and not yet airborne, then an ALL+Canada GS might be most effective.

Oh, and for reference, there have been times where 40 MIT for ZTL to ZDC wasn’t even enough for spacing LGA arrivals and we had to seek other solutions. One thing we did was implement a mandatory reroute from the FAA Playbook that swapped the arrivals to come through ZOB and this alleviated congestion some. ZDC also did a great job in creating space for us while that was happening. If I remember correctly, BOS didn’t have a whole lot of traffic coming in so nothing was necessary with them, though if it were a problem, I would’ve had them on CFR.

Quote from: JEREMY PETERSON on January 20, 2018, 07:20:19 PM

Total airborne time ranged from just under 14 minutes to just over 1 hour!

Might that one hour one have been me?  I departed KFRG at 0231z and was probably handed to Philly Approach at around 0330z.  However, I was in a DC3 making about 130 knots over the ground, so... lol.  I don't know if your stats are including only aircraft who arrived into or departed from KJFK, or those who passed through the terminal airspace.

No, JFK departures and arrivals are only captured in these stats.

Quote from: JEREMY PETERSON on January 20, 2018, 07:20:19 PM

• BOS: 19 arrivals/30 departures

You're saying BOS only received 19 arrivals throughout the entire event? Or just from JFK? Either way I'd check that - definitely is not correct.

From JFK. I thought this might be suspect too but those are the stats I got. If ZBW would like to run a review on their end, we could see better what happened.

Quote from: JEREMY PETERSON on October 25, 2017, 10:34:53 PM

By the way, if anybody has knowledge, motivation, or pre-existing traffic management or VATSIM data processing tools and want to continue developing them, vATCSCC has platforms through which this can be facilitated (i.e., Google Cloud Platform). If you would like to contribute or have a system to work in (don't have to worry about storage, have access to cloud data services, etc.), shoot me an email! We'd love to have your help.

Just to clarify:  Are you offering to fund the operations of other TM related development with your GCP account?

Well it’s more like find the platform on which you have the freedom to develop your systems through the vATCSCC system...is that makes sense. For all intents and purposes, yes.

I wish I could say I'm surprised that this has gotten such a negative response. Traffic management is one of those topics that is so foreign to a lot of people on this network, and I'm happy to see someone actually trying to make a difference.

Good luck with the project, I bookmarked and will be checking in!

Thanks! If you’re looking to be more involved than just the training (i.e., administration or other stuff) or know people who might be, I’d certainly appreciate the help.

Appreciate the response Ira. I am aware of the content that ZNY made with Alex Evins and AJ, but that information is either inaccessible or deprecated. That content was also before "my time" here with ZNY. During the time between then and now, I perceived a lull in the attention given to traffic management, so my interest in it led me to create this. Plus, I want to create this project in a fashion that I synthesized, rather than an extension of what was already created.

Due to the shear nature of the traffic management community, the materials overlap. Nonetheless, all of my content is original. Any resemblance to previously created material is simply coincidence. I have citations for any material used other than that which is easily accessible and publicly distributed content (like most pictures or videos)

I would love to see the material that ZNY had but such material is not readily available without me having to reach out to someone for the resources (which I don't want to do).

And at this point, I have no inclination of including VATUSA management on this (yet). I want to create a workable system first with material that I created. That's my take. Hope this clears some things up.