Paper Calendars

 My wife, God bless her, was searching for something-or-other and came upon my old work calendars.  She wanted to throw them away. Gasp!  Not on your life, Darling.

You see, when you work a different shift every day, calendars are important.  So calendars are important to air traffic controllers.  Hmmm. That makes me wonder what controllers use as calendars now.  Back in my day, it was a paper calendar you stuck in your back pocket.

Yes, by the end of the year they were being held together with duct tape.  And God forbid you lost your calendar.  That would be almost as bad as losing your smart phone these days.  Not quite as bad, (we're building ourselves quite the single-point-of-failure) but a calendar had all your contacts in it too.

Anyway, I thought I'd check to see how much more traffic controllers are working now than back in my day.  Okay, not really.  I only wrote that just to set you up.  Folks might think that, surely, with all the billions of dollars worth of computer systems the Federal Aviation Administration has bought over the last two decades, we'd certainly be handling more airplanes.  But no, we're not.  Or, they are not. (I don't get to be part of "we" anymore, I suppose.)

It's the same old line you hear in business: It doesn't help to enlarge (or automate) the factory if you don't expand the loading dock.  The FAA's loading dock is a runway.  Unless you think we're going to build a new runway in New York City, we're really not going to have many more airplanes flying into New York. 

Anyway, I still wanted to see the numbers.  And for a few minutes, I wondered where I would get them.  Yep, I still have a paper brain.  Everything is (of course) online.  At "Opsnet". 

Once you learn how to use it, it's pretty cool.  Just remember, I'm not a data guy.  For instance, I was going to go with the day before Christmas Eve for a comparison.  But depending on when Santa Claus came, in relation to the weekend, that might not be fair.  Then I thought about the day before Thanksgiving.  That's always  a Wednesday.  As a bonus, it is usually the busiest day of the year for traveling. (Side track: Atlanta Center has had its busiest day during The Masters golf tournament on occasion.)  But Opsnet gives you a date (say 11/23/2023) and not "the day before Thanksgiving".  This is getting to be a hassle.  I just went with the busiest day I found in November, for each year. (It wasn't always the day before Thanksgiving.)

Once last thing.  The FAA has this disclaimer on the main landing page for Opsnet:

"The process for capturing center counts was updated in October 2018. Data prior to October 2018 uses the original historical counts process that allocates flights differently. Data is not comparable across the differently processed periods of time."

The FAA regularly changed the way it counts things throughout my 25-year career.  They do it to stop people from doing exactly what I'm doing here -- comparing yesteryear to today.  There might be a valid reason for a government, of the people, by the people, for the people, to do that.  I just don't know what that reason might be.

You'll be happy to know, my record of November 22, 2005, agrees with the FAA's data of 11/22/2005.  Oh, I didn't mention that did I?  Sorry.  I made a habit of writing down the daily traffic count at Atlanta Center (the facility ID is ZTL) for every day I was working.  There are a lot of other things you can learn from my calendars -- if I  can keep my wife from throwing them away.

11/22/2005 ZTL -- 10,065
11/22/2006 ZTL -- 9,900
11/20/2007 ZTL --10,228
11/26/2008 ZTL -- 8,674
11/20/2009 ZTL -- 8,687
11/24/2010 ZTL -- 8,895
11/23/2011 ZTL -- 8,620
11/25/2012 ZTL -- 8,673
11/14/2013 ZTL -- 8,420
11/21/2014 ZTL -- 8,922
11/29/2015 ZTL -- 9,770
11/27/2016 ZTL -- 10,132
11/16/2017 ZTL -- 10,035
11/16/2018 ZTL -- 9,457
11/08/2019 ZTL -- 9,336
11/20/2020 ZTL --7,468
11/28/2021 ZTL -- 9,844
11/18/2022 ZTL -- 8,788

Don Brown
December 18, 2023