I always would laugh when controllers at a class C area such as KABQ and KELP would start to melt down when they had more than five aircraft at once
I can't comment on ABQ, but I can tell you that at ELP there are only four controllers left with over twenty years of experience, two more who are maybe approaching fifteen years (but probably are closer to ten), two more with five years experience, and practically everyone else with three years or less. On top of that, there are only thirteen fully certified controllers trying to train a dozen developmentals (actually less, because many of those fully certified controllers don't have enough time to be trainers). The experience level is less now than it was immediately following the strike in '81, the training received coming out of the Oklahoma City Academy is nowhere near what it was even a decade ago, morale is in the tank, the trainers are burned out, and things are as bleak as I've ever seen in over thirty-four years in this business.
You can thank Marion Blakey if service is falling off, as this is all a direct result of her tenure and the mad rush of experienced controllers hitting the doors (including me only one month following eligibility in 2009) to get off a sinking ship. I don't expect any significant improvement for up to a decade, from what I'm seeing, and the huge increase in near misses nationwide pretty much backs up just how bad things have gotten since the White Book was imposed on the controller workforce five years ago last month.
And because controllers retire at about the 25-year mark, and since Administrator Blakey's policies actually aggravated an already existing controller shortage when she should have been doing everything she could to smooth out the first "PATCO echo," you can expect the same degradation in service in ANOTHER twenty-five years because she all but ensured yet ANOTHER "PATCO echo" will hit again then.
Just my 2¢. And, yes, it saddens me because when I got to ELP we were working four times the traffic (my highest hourly count on local once hit 120 operations way back then) with a heck of a lot more efficiency and vastly better service.
