Another year, another 13 AIRACs gone. This has been a challenging year, with increased workload placed upon the department, after the loss of some experienced staff. With the introduction of the UK Controller Plugin API, some advances in flow control, and our ever-more present role in traffic planning for big events, it becomes hard to keep up with all our day to day roles!

 

One of our focuses this year has been to try to increase the list of airports that we can support documentation for each AIRAC cycle, rather than having to wait a year or two for their release. This requires a lot of short/medium-term work to standardise, re-write and then maintain documents. With the 2022 release of new vMATS for Manchester, Stansted and Luton we have a current vMATS for all our top 10 airports.

 

Network Traffic

 

Despite expectations of a dramatic fall in network traffic, total UK traffic has slowly increased since 2020. Here are some interesting trends to share with you, data source primarily statsim.net.

 

 

As you can see, small increases in airport movements continue each year. Strangely however, the largest increases were not at  Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester - although they remain our top 3 airports by traffic numbers. All 3 of these saw a drop in both arrival and departure numbers, with a substantial drop in Heathrow (primarily departures), leading to Gatwick overtaking to become the top UK airport (by traffic movements).

 

 

Our “Top 5” airports remained some of the busiest in the world in 2022, with Gatwick, Heathrow and Manchester holding 2nd, 3rd and 9th positions, respectively. Sadly, Heathrow has lost the top spot to Frankfurt. Perhaps we can reclaim it in 2023?

 

Our traffic numbers and popularity of airports leads to a challenge during events of the year, with us regularly landing 30-35 planes per hour at Heathrow:
 

• Euroshuttle Heathrow-Hamburg: https://simaware.ca/event/345

• Heathrow-Munich: https://simaware.ca/event/392

• Cross the Pond Eastbound 2022: https://simaware.ca/analysis/395

 

The Team

 

This was my first whole year as the Operations Director, having been appointed December 1st 2021. My thanks to the excellent support of Harry S, @Chad Byworth, @Luke Brown and @Thomas Mills throughout most of the year. Thanks as well to @Ellis Delgado, our former operations assistant, who left near the beginning of 2022.

 

I am pleased to go into 2023 with 2 fresh faces, @Peter Mooney and @Harrison Grose, who join the team to primarily assist with aerodrome operations helping me to fill the void left by Chad’s resignation. 

 

I intend to open up applications again for more positions in a few months. You are all welcome to get in touch with me if you’re interested in helping with documentation.

 

Sector File & Controller Pack

 

We released 11 sector files this year, over 13 AIRAC cycles. This involves the team sitting down every month to track down changes in the AIRAC and then deciding all the places they need to be updated. The community is very helpful in completing many of the sector file tasks with our sector file coordinators keeping an overview. 

 

In 2022 we had 31 contributors to the sector file that submitted 95,706 line additions over 548 commits. Special thanks to @Peter Mooney, @Mikolaj Huk, @Daniel Button, @James Bayliss-de Gruchy as non-staff members submitting large volumes to our sector file.

 

We are always in need of more people to help and contribute changes to the sector file. The more that the membership can do, the more time our team has to develop or facilitate new features. Please consider getting involved: https://github.com/VATSIM-UK/UK-Sector-File.

 

2023

 

2022 saw us implementing the Luton airspace changes and FRA in Scotland. These were huge challenges for the department to deliver documentation on time. We’re excited for the even larger changes that 2023 will bring.

 

Those of you ‘Ops-interested’ may already know what I’m referring to…

Happy New Year to you all.