I went over to Seattle Approach this week to sit down with their rep. I visited with him pretty extensively, and I also briefly met with some of their controllers and their ATM.
Some takeaways from my visit:
- They recognize that they’ve struggled with departure spacing and want to get better. They’ve been discussing a lot of ideas and are open to ideas that we have.
In particular, they’re very interested in adding speed control to departing aircraft. They are working on an agreement with Seattle Tower where the tower would give them 230 KTS on all jet departures, and they’re proposing that they assign a faster speed before they ship them to us (the discussions have been surrounding either 250 KTS or 270 KTS). All aircraft would be our control for speeds on contact. I indicated to them that I want feedback from our membership before agreeing to anything, but I do think that it makes sense and would help both us and them. Instead of getting overtakes, all airplanes would come over going the same speed. We would get a much more consistent product. SEA is one of only three Core 30 FAA airports that doesn’t have assigned speeds on departure, and I think it makes sense to fall in line with what almost all of the busier airports across the NAS are doing.
I’m very interested in your feedback on this subject, so please let me know what thoughts you have.
- Our friends in TMU will randomly ask us to assign all A/C on the MARNR arrival 250 KTS at MARNR in a south flow, which is really a pain for us because of the extra phraseology. I’m not a fan of doing this. Having said that, their rep wanted me to convey that it is very helpful to them, and that if they’re asking for it they need it. I pointed out that BOANE is literally six miles from MARNR and that the restriction is 250KTS there. The problem is that they take the majority of airplanes on the MARNR arrival off it for sequencing, and since they can’t slow them until they’re inside of their airspace, they’re stuck with an airplane doing 270 KTS that they’re trying to sequence with a plane on the HAWKZ that’s doing 210 KTS.
We agreed to work on changing the arrival restriction to 250 KTS so that we don’t have to give the extra verbiage (and they can speed aircraft back up if they want), but in the meantime know that if S46 asks for 250 KTS at MARNR, it’s because they really need it.
- Over the years, whenever a supe comes up to me and says, “I just talked to TMU, and they need you to spin this heavy,” I’ve almost always rolled my eyes. However, their rep showed me the spacing requirements they have between SEA heavy aircraft and BFI landers. The more heavies that they have, the more complex their operation becomes. If the supe asks you to spin a heavy, it’s probably because an S46 controller has gotten tubed and needs help. So help them.
- From our perspective, the HAWKZ arrival “works” in a north flow in the sense that it allows us to give S46 airplanes 5 miles in trail. However, the arrival works really, really poorly for approach. They only have a tiny bit of time before airplanes turn onto final. Over the years, many things have been done to try and address this, including having us provide 10 miles-in-trail on the HAWKZ. Our friends in TMU raised that idea to me when I was a brand-new rep … and I promptly told them no. I’m all for us helping, but 10 miles in trail when it’s north flow is so much work for us to do to basically compensate for the arrival being broken.
To me, the solution is that we need to fix the arrival for north flow.
I proposed to S46 that we reinvestigate moving the arrival inside of S46’s airspace so that it goes to the west side of R6703 during a north operation. This has been considered before and then dropped. I am all in favor of trying to make it happen, and so is S46. The attitude of a lot of people has been, “It takes years to change an arrival.” OK, so let’s get going. Let’s try and fix the arrival so that it works better for everyone. I don’t know whether it will get off the ground — I would anticipate there being environmental concerns and pushback from airlines — but I want to at least try.
- Because of COVID, we haven’t been able to visit S46 over the past two years. However, I am very interested in getting our controllers over there to talk to their controllers as we’re able and our staffing allows. And our friends at S46 expressed interest in getting their controllers over to ZSE to talk to us. I think the more conversations that we have controller-to-controller, the better. They’re our NATCA brothers and sisters over there. When you don’t see someone besides the landline lighting up and answering, it can be easy to forget that. But they are human beings who want to do a good job, and I want us to have more interactions as it’s safe to do so.
In solidarity,
Dan Rasmussen
801-860-3821