Air Traffic Control Fully Certified
Air Traffic Control Time Certified In Pos 1 (yrs) 28.0
Communication Breakdown; Situational Awareness; Workload
ATC Issue All Types; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Other / Unknown; Inflight Event / Encounter Weather / Turbulence
Air Traffic Control Provided Assistance; Air Traffic Control Issued New Clearance; Air Traffic Control Issued Advisory / Alert; Air Traffic Control Separated Traffic; Flight Crew Requested ATC Assistance / Clarification; General Flight Cancelled / Delayed
Airspace Structure; Weather; Staffing; Human Factors; Company Policy
This last week of [weather] has been a nightmare. The first few days nobody had any idea of what was going on and it was total chaos. The planes were afraid to fly and constantly torturing us for information and help. We could give none. I am not going to go into great length here because I could literally write pages. But almost everyday sectors go red and need a tracker. Why? The rest of the center is doing nothing. Doesn't Traffic Management Unit (TMU) have enough time to help us from keeping the sectors from going out of control? The people in the FAA Command Center say we are slowing down the system too much. You cannot ram 40 or 50 airplanes into one sector no matter how big that sector is. No one human can talk to that many airplanes at once. Impossible. And no matter how much we tried to tell the pilots about what to do when they departed it did not seem to help. There was pretty much zero information distribution to the users. They all just hopped in their airplanes and thought Cneter would take care of everything like we always do. Except for the efforts of the controllers in the Ocean Area; it seemed like nobody else cared what was happening as long the planes kept getting through. Like I said; trackers plugged in everywhere. Handoff and Assist positions everywhere. We do not have enough controllers in my area for this. People outside of this building need to get a clue and come down here and watch how totally unsafe this is.
A Center Controller reported their sectors are being overloaded with complex traffic and Traffic Management Units are not doing anything to affect the flow.