The EGATS

Annual General Meeting (AGM) 2021 will be held on

17.06.2021  at 16:00

in M0.04a (old canteen) and via TEAMS.

If you want to join via TEAMS please notify Michael Ott prior the meeting. The filled out “Nomination Form” to join the Executive Board has to be returned by 08.05.2021 to Michael. You can request the form at board@egats.org.

A G M

The EGATS

Annual General Meeting (AGM)2020

will be held on

26.06.2020

 at 16:00

In D3.13/D3.14

Dear members,

Please have a look at what has been discussed:

• OSM night: We sent an Email stating our opinion about the current state of the project and raising our questions and concerns. The feedback received was positive and management mostly shares our view. The project is still at an early stage and has to be seen more as a study, which we will continue to follow. For us the key points at this stage are that single-men-operation is from the table and having a commitment from management, that training for a MUAC night licence will be voluntary only, if this would be the outcome of the study.
• What happened during this year’s IFATCA annual conference keeps us busy and we are still discussing possible actions. We will inform you in more detail about this in a separate publication, shortly.
• We decided to lower the price for the leftover sweaters by 50% to only 10€. The money received by this will be donated to charity. So feel free to do something good and buy some more as well for your kids, friends, etc. ;o)

For any questions and suggestions, don’t hesitate to ask us or contact us via email.

Your EGATS EB

Dear members,

Summer traffic is approaching fast now, please have a look at what has been discussed:

• We are still very busy with the OSM project. Mainly the night part is giving us a lot of work, since the project lead has changed recently and it takes our constant effort to stay involved. There has been simulations recently, to which EGATS was not invited and in which single man sector operations was simulated, which is not any option for MUAC. This point has been clarified with management as well. Now the focus is again to study the feasibility of different options, which might deliver a saving in the nights shift staffing.
• ERM 2020: EGATS will run to organize the IFATCA European Regional Meeting 2020 in Maastricht. Currently we are planning for a meeting from 07.10-09.10. Of course we can use any help for this event, so should you be available and willing to help, please contact any board member.
• The 2019 summer initiative was better prepared than last year. However the reduction in traffic feels overdone at this stage.

For any questions and suggestions don’t hesitate to ask us or contact us via email.

Your EGATS EB

1) Opening—President’s Welcome: Opening 17:31 lcl
2) Acceptance of the Draft Minutes AGM 2018: The minutes are accepted unanimously.
3) Reports:
a) President’s Message: Nothing to add to the report.
b) Executive Secretary: Nothing to add to the report.
c) Professional and Technical Work items
i) Optimized Sector Manning project (OSM):
(1) The project lead was passed on from Robert Parys to Rüdiger Ehrmanntraut. Ian Middleton shared our surprise about simulating single-men-operations as one of the possible options last week. On Friday we will have a meeting with Rüdiger, the OSM/night project manager, to discuss the project in more detail.
(2) OSM/MSP is planned for a OPS trial (Jever/Holstein) in November and we will make sure we will be present as well.
ii) CSS 2.0: Nothing to add to the report.
iii) Professional Behaviour Committee (PBC): Adrian reports that the Staff Committee is pushing for official terms of reference for the PBC.
iv) Roster Revision Team (RRT): It is still not known when the fair share tool will be available. At least not before Feb 2020 at the very earliest.
v) Training section: The pass-rate of the first round of Abinitios is very promising. We hope the success rate will continue. There are still adjustments being made in the training to even improve the quality. Next year the intake is foreseen to increase from 26 to 36 Abinitios per year.
vi) INREP: The number of reports is dropping.
d) Membership: We recently had a spike in applications.
e) IFATCA: EGATS is investigation in the organization of the European Regional Meeting in 2020 and we already have been assured to get support from DIRMAS.
f) Flight Department: We are very happy with Vincent’s work and the new deals that were established. The flight department is far more busy at the moment than in previous years.
g) Photo competition 2019: Nothing to add to the report.
h) Treasurer
– Overview 2018
– Audit Committee—Discharge of Treasurer for 2018: Steven is unanimously discharged
– Budget 2019: approved
4) Approval to extend the board: The motion is approved unanimously.
5) Elections EB 2019: Due to the extension of the board no elections were necessary and all “old” board members standing for re-election (Frederic, Michael, Viktor, Steven, Adrian and Jaakko) are confirmed. On top of that we are very happy to welcome Robert Klos as newly appointed board member.
6) Election Audit Committee/Election Committee: Due to lack of volunteers Michael will
contact the committees from last year to ask them to volunteer again.
7) Work items for the upcoming year:
a) OSM: Our main work item at present is taking up a lot of time. As well we constantly
have to fight to get invited/involved to stay in the picture.
b) Military integration/harmonisation: Sascha is following this mainly.
8) AOB:
a) Clare announced to step down from her function as CISM administrator in the
beginning of 2020. One of the reasons is that she didn’t get the AoDs needed within
her working time, which are necessary to get the job done. Normally an ATCO on a
official side-track is foreseen as administrator, and there are no side-tracks possible
in EOS. Presently we are discussing with management the possibility to assign Clare
the 15 AoDs the CISM administrator is entitled to within the working time. If we will be
successful, Clare hopefully reconsiders her decision and continues her excellent
work. If not the 15 AoDs will have to come from ATCO pool, which is not desirable,
looking at the staffing issues we are facing in MUAC.
b) We are invited to join the innovation and engagement group and will discuss this
further at the next board meeting.
c) After asking for it, we did get an introduction into the ARGOS project, which is aiming
at automation of ATC. We will take this up as well as part of our work.
d) We are planning to establish a concept to work closer together with TUEM. After
Frederic stepping down from the TUEM board we feel the need to investigate
different ways to collaborate in the future.
9) Closing 19:20

This is a summary of what has been discussed:

• Our main work item is OSM (optimised sector manning) with its two pillars being MSP (multi sector planner) and night-manning. We still follow both projects, keep raising our concerns, and sharing our worries. However, the project team believes that these problems can somehow be overcome and continues with further steps. We will continue to monitor, but want to use this opportunity to raise your awareness and to be very careful when getting involved with this: a number of colleagues have been rostered for workshops and simulations in the next months. Be aware that your input might support the loss of one of the most important pillars of our safety net: the 4-eyes principle and us always working in a team of two. Is this something you don’t mind to lose?
• Vincent Laeremans (simulator assistant) took over as chairman of the flight department and straight away arranged new deals with Turkish Airlines and Icelandair. We are very happy to have a new and very motivated chairman and we will offer him all the support we can give.
• We plan to do our AGM on 03.04.2019. More information will follow in due time.

For any questions and suggestions don’t hesitate to ask us or contact us via email.

Happy Christmas Days!

Here is a summary of what has been discussed:

• We broadly discussed our experience with the ab-initio training at the moment. There are many worries/items that came up in the discussion (e.g.: rostering problems, lack of practical exams, focus too much on quantity rather than on quality, staff shortage, etc.) and it seems difficult where to start. Generally we feel like we need to gather more experience to come up with solid suggestions for improvements. Maybe a broader review similar to the CSS review should be done in the future.
• We will change our setup for the “day of the controller” slightly from the years before. The timeframe when massages will be offered will be shorter, but we will offer a talk/discussion about EGATS work and some snacks on top.
• CSS 2.0: So far, we only hear positive comments about the new OPS-setup, especially when the ARM is from the “home” sector group. On the other hand there are some issues with CONNECT. Decisions, which SUPs will be involved in line-management, were taken without asking individuals about their preference and even after the decision was taken nobody informed staff involved about their changed responsibility.
• We received the report of the second round of MSP simulations and still see no solutions for the main worries we had from the beginning: how to keep situational awareness in two different sectors, monitoring of two different FQ, loss of 4-eye-principle.

For any questions and suggestions don’t hesitate to ask us or contact us via email.

Your EGATS EB

Here is a summary of what has been discussed:

• OSM-Multi-Sector-Planner: A second simulation was conducted in May having one PC for Holstein and Jever sector. We are waiting for the report, however remain very sceptical for multiple reasons. Taking away another buffer in our already busy and unpredictable environment, loss of the 4-eye-principle, loss of monitoring of the FQ by the planner are critical points that make MSP less safe than a team of EC and PC. The only reason for this project in our eyes is the shortage of staff.
• We discussed our experience so far with the 4EC-initiative and agreed that the briefing was too late and too general. The flyer was not saying anything. It seems to us that MUAC underestimated the scale of the 4EC-initiative. For next year it needs to be clear that the ATCOs working at the sharp end have all the information needed to understand the measures taken and how to apply them correctly. As well a greater understanding of the measures would in our eyes lead to a greater acceptability. The early involvement of side-trackers already at the workshops with the other centres would make things smoother and could lead to a better result for MUAC and our customers.
• In all 4 sector groups there is more and more pressure due to lack of staff. We will do our best to make sure the current rules for planning staff, breaks and  opening and closing sectors are taken into account at all times.
• We will contact the staff association to contact a German corporate benefit site to make the deals available for MUAC staff.

For any questions and suggestions don’t hesitate to ask us or contact us via email.

Your EGATS EB

Here is a summary of what has been discussed:

• Alessandro Mercati is confirmed by the board to take over the presidency from Raf Vigorita.
• Sascha Martin, Viktor Koren and Adrian Stefan will be the 3 INREP trustees, after Kris Scicluna and Alessandro Mercati stepped down.
• Most of the meeting time was used for a presentation by Robert Parys, Gareth Lawton and Herbert Koppe about OSM, especially the possibilities to make night shift staffing more effective.
  Four options are discussed:
  • Current roster and Planning rules, but reduce the staff for the night shift from 4 to 3 ATCOs per SG
  • Combine all three SGs to one MUAC sector
  • Spin-off from option 2. Collapse the DECO SG and HAN SG to one sector and keep the BRU SG as a standalone sector
  • Single man operation. Three ATCOs (one per SG) sit next to each other and they work their AOR on their own.

On all four options, the night is worked with only 3 ATCOs per SG. EGATS has reservations against all 4 options and insists on keeping the 4-eye-principle. Simulations on option 3 and 4 are planned for Q1/2019.
The current night-rostering has proved to work well for over 10 years and the board sees no option to reduce the staffing during night further without any safety implications or taking a huge risk to close the airspace for at least part of the night.For MSP the project group foresees the necessity for a lot of technical changes before they will plan a second round of simulations.

For any questions and suggestions don’t hesitate to ask us or contact us via email.

Your EGATS EB

Here is a summary of what has been discussed:

• Please note the date  for the EGATS AGM: 26 Februart 2018 @ 17:30
• Olno trial: The board is happy that necessary steps were identified and it is now FAC involved in future evaluations.
• CSS review: Projects have been launched following the outcome of the CSS review. More info will follow in due time.
• OSM: A new Multi-Sector Planner simulation will be planned in the 2nd quarter 2018. We continue to monitor the project and give our opinion about different ideas.

For any questions and suggestions don’t hesitate to ask us or contact us via email.

Your EGATS EB