Due to the current world situation daily traffic on Vatsim has tripled in size. It averages around 1900+ connections on quite days. The last few FNO's have turned into traffic jams due to the large amount of traffic. What use to be 100+ arrivals during a previous FNO is now around 250-300 just on the arrival side. Not sure if VATUSA is looking at a way to improve the traffic flow by adding more controllers or adding more arrival airport during the FNO. Tonight just for Philly I saw 71 departures and 260 arrivals when I looked. That doesn't even include all the traffic for the surrounding airports.
Just throwing this out there, FNO's are suppose to be fun. I know it's only temporary but for how long nobody knows. Just making some suggestions to see if things can be smoothed out some.
Very simply FNO's must include other Major airports in the area. It should have been called East Coast Ops and everything from Boston down to Florida should have the opportunity for exposure and to be fully staffed.
When you advertise the FNO for a single field that's where everyone will want to fly into because that's where all the controllers are going to be. It's like a traffic jam during rush hour with all but one lane open.
With current events, surely everyone is eager to control and fly but due to the spotlight being on one airport on a Friday night, you end up with something even the real world couldn't handle.
Coordination between the ARTCC's will be more streamlined because then everyone will be included in the event.
Advertise and staff more airports and watch the traffic scatter because pilots will actually have more than one choice of where to fly into and out of with fully staffed ATC.
