Tim
I'm not going to get into it with you because you hold a position in ZDC. I reported where I had the problem and how we as the pilots were getting hosed because the folks on the ground couldn't work together. Your comment about letting proceed just proves there is a problem by your answer. When we question the ATC pilots are to blame.
Sir now you are saying "the folks on the ground couldn't work together" but earlier you were saying that ZDC wasn't doing the job and holding people. ZDC can't do much when PHL can only take certain arrivals per hour. I wasn't the guy in charge or controlling enroute so I can't say much, however, I believe they tried their best to stop too much aircraft enters ZDC. However, if neighbor ARTCC keeps dumping traffic into ZDC, all they can do was to hold people until PHL clears up. If you see a tree's leaves turning brown, it might not be the leave's problem.
Now let's talk about why people were entering ZDC from Atlanta but not Indy. To make it simpler, let's just say ZDC was ok with that. Here's an example. There is a highway that having a traffic jam because the exit is jammed. There's also a traffic light to control traffic on the highway. The lane with green light can get on the highway and the lane with red light cannot. Sir you are sitting in the lane waiting for the red light and complaining about the traffic light and the highway.
You guys at DC love your metaphors. Call it what it was, a mess. You can't fault the pilots who got bounced around between Indy and DC as we were cleared and following instructions from take-off to holds. By the way, I'm not the one responsible for coordinating traffic, your guys are. So if I come-on here to voice my dissatisfaction don't try to make me the bad guy because their was too much traffic. I'm sure another DC controller will chime in. Your good at that. I'm out and done replying because it's getting nowhere.
Actually I'll chime in. Hi, I'm the ZNY Events Coordinator. We declared an arrival rate of 51 at the start of the event. We ended up landing above that rate for 3 hours (see
this nifty link). This means we were landing
better than we anticipated. Also, if you would like a log of all of the
traffic management initiatives (which I recorded in the National Traffic Management Log), let me know and you can see how much we
actually coordinated (note, this does not necessarily include things coordinated internally or via voice on the New York Metro Hotline which we use to connect different ARTCCs to assist in coordination of traffic management
things).
We had some problems, yes: we wanted to mitigate South Approach (PHL_SA_APP) becoming oversaturated because we know in the past, it gets easily oversaturated by BOS traffic on J121 and ATL on PAATS. We planned splitting ATL traffic through ZID to route them on the BOJID (the north arrival) and BOS via SPUDS to move some traffic north. Unfortunately, ZID ended up not taking ATL departures through them and ZBW didn't have enough staff to support reroutes so neither of those initiatives was as effective as they needed to be. This contributed to metering delays out of ZID, ATL, and some other places.
Traffic management transcends the small-picture, individualness of single flights. It involves managing flows of aircraft, working within/between ATC facilities, and inter-ARTCC routing and initiatives. To think that problems affecting an FNO are limited to certain flights or ways certain controllers handle things is misguided. It takes a big-picture view to understand what happens on the ground and in the air.
