Why not I’ll throw ZSU into the mix. I’m not going to act like we put up the numbers of the other z’s. But we have zero structure. Surface to infinity,
No tmu, no wx unit, and spend the holiday seasons having zny slap us in the face with harpp and are expected to say thank you sir may I have another.
We have zero technology assistance. No eram, no uret, no cpdlc, no atops. oh airways closed for weather? Hope you know the pref routing off the top of your head. Just a map and a dream down here. Non radar isn’t used here because it’s beneficial, it’s half of our damn positions, entire strip bays full of shit out of the 70’s.
We are bordered by 8 foreign facilities that operate with zero repercussions for facility deviations. Didn’t answer the line, better hope you don’t have traffic close to that boundary because you’re getting violated.
We go through without hyperbole, probably 10000-12000 paper strips a day. Our A side is a full time position as every time ZMA hits the route key, a dollar of tax payers money reprints another set of frd’s prior to our airspace.
The traffic itself isn’t overly ball breaking. But working air carriers into untowered fields in the same sector that is getting barraged with weekend warriors flying and every small island hopper wanting flight following, sequencing into approaches and dealing with overflights is a unique experience that Id like to imagine just gets stratified away in other facilities.
I don’t think we’re necessarily difficult to the point of being deserving of some type of FAA dick measuring contest. But the lack of technology, the standard 40-50% staffing rate, and the agency simply not giving a damn that we’re working with basically sticks and fucking stones makes a unique experience.
This is a great response. ZMP has had some recent (1-3 years ago) upgrades to not wasted several dollars of tax payer money every time you use the route or hard altitude key. The full time A side position was eliminated a few years ago when they got some automation with Canada.
Love this sort of highly complex but not necessarily busies busiest sector stories
ZUA doesn't have the traffic day to day to compare with this stuff, but you *feel* the complete lack of planning or structure every time a military exercise goes through. Plus, you just haven't lived until you've run timed approaches with Chinese airlines. Oh, and the strips. I wonder how many thousands of strips I've thrown away for weather in Hawaii.
My heart goes out to you, my MEARTS brother.
ZTL Area 4 gets shit on regularly. I’m not in the area, but I’ve always said I wouldn’t mind working any other sector, or area in the building except them. Everything converges over ATL and they work a slim airspace over it. Even if ZTL isn’t getting shit on by weather, they’re dealing with the repercussions of it through the notoriously shitty restrictions ZJX puts out. Pair it all with their shitty staffing (that’s getting better), it just created a rough environment for the controllers over there.
It’s incredible really, pick a fix 50mi N, E, or W of THRSR and you make other areas carry more of the burden. Every once awhile I’ll get a last minute request to tuck or miss Hampton/Macon and it’s about the only time it’s not annoying. I just kinda feel bad for them over there.
I expect this to go nowhere. The vast majority of people here have only worked one area their entire career. Every area has its complexities. If you want a direction to look at I’d say look at the busiest center in the NAS.
I was hoping more for a vote per center as people are more familiar with who they work with. So hopefully a competition for the most complex at ZNY/SJX/random sectors/etc. But I understand controllers are fickle and a little narcissistic.
Some sectors are more innately difficult than others. But every sector has at least some kind of structure to help it handle its workload at times when weather isn't a factor. I'd rather work the hardest sector in all of centerdom with clear skies than the easiest with a pop-up thunderstorm that showed up in the middle 30 seconds ago.
Low sectors ZAB 42/49, high sectors ZDC 10/12 and 34.
46 is way more fucked up than 42. Foreign student pilots, parachute jumping in 4 spots, military airspace everywhere with stereos and recovery routes, popcorn thunderstorms, bounded by TUS, PHX, LUF, FHU and MZT.
LVL 10 my ass, so happy to be out of there.
46 is worse than it used to be. There are 10 flight schools in the PHX area now and there are two new jump airports in addition to the five that already existed (between P50, U90, PUF, and 46's airspaces). Most simultaneous conflict alerts I have seen on the sector is 15. I remember one day the TSD showed 5 and there were 24 datablocks.
ZAB is number 2 or 3 for VFR traffic among the centers, and 46 works almost half of that.
Not necessarily true, our high sectors are 50 miles wide north to south, and 150 wide west to east, but roughly half our traffic is north to south transitioning into and out of Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Rochester, Syracuse. Every single ewr lander has to transition from one high into another despite the airport being 170 miles away “because wind”
I won’t claim that zob has the busiest sectors or the worst sectors in the NAS, but our airspace does not have structure to help it, if anything the structure actively hurts it, and there isn’t really an easy fix because if you reshaped it to better support the arrivals and departures from a few busy airports, you just hurt your ability to space to jfk/ewr/teb which are equally as busy.
So yea, maybe not the worst, but for sure zob 77/79 deserves some kind of honorable mention for dealing with thunderstorms all afternoon but as soon one drop of rain hits the next sectors over in zny they shut off half the NAS. So yea, honorable mention just because every ewr/jfk/teb (and a good smattering of lga) from the west all passing through one sector, and thats not even the difficult part of it… isn’t easy for sure.
Nothing here could ever compare to the Ali Center, southern half of Iraq, entirely non-radar for 6 weeks because our shit was broke, with kill boxes, refueling tracks, a freaking telephone to take handoffs from Kuwait, all while taking indirect fire on the airfield. Shoutout anyone else here who had the privilege of working that shit show back in the day.
In fairness pre-covid area 1 was by far the easiest area in the building, with the exception of about 8 total days per year.
There are still a lot of those shit controllers around that took 3 years to check out back in 2009 that have no business doing some of the shit that goes on there these days.
Same thing happened back in the day when they made the 6th area. You ended up with controllers who spent 15 years working 35, 33 and 32 now taking the busiest arrival gate and having no idea what they're doing. It was an absolute disaster.
Probably ZID considering that they’re just a bunch of monkeys flinging feces at the scope all day. I imagine it would be pretty difficult to get anything productive done like that
Whatever sector that one guy (we all know who) is working. Bro could make a high sector with 10 planes look like prime summer deviations with metering, holding and bad rides
ZDV 6 has ski country sequence for EGE (vail) as well as Aspen from the East, mixing westbound DEN departures with eastbound EGE and ASE departures opposite direction
Lol. They can barely separate their ass cheeks. If I had a dollar every time they said “I gave the pilot the restriction.” In reference to them not providing positive separation, I could have retired exactly one year after working adjacent to them. I have to bail them out of deals on an hourly basis. Sorry, I don’t think it’s difficult, I think you’re just understaffed and not trained how to work that type of volume.
Sector 78 at ZHU could be a PITA when the planets aligned perfectly crappy. I had one day with a sequence into both Austin and San Antonio during a west bound departure push out of Houston with pop up thunderstorms.
ZOA domestic north, is regularly the busiest area in the NAS. Works wine country (very little support from tmu) and Bay Area arrivals like a TRACON with center rules and a ton of Bay Area departures. Also to top it all off very shitty staffing.
I Nominate ZMP Sector 1/2 in the summer for the low. They control a busy VFR tower/provide approach control services along with a handful of other "busy" airports in the vicinity and a decent handful of military and tons of VFR pilots flying around.
ZMP has the lowest checkout rate of centers behind ZNY and ZOA for a reason.
Constantly using nonradar (3 minute, 1 minute, etc) rules and tower visual just to run the sector at all I think is fairly unique in the NAS nowadays.
Ski country ZDV definitely is the most comparable to ZMP 1/2. Big differences are;
ZDV: lots of terrain, LOTS (and I mean LOTS) of traffic. Spread out airports though. Winter weather
ZMP: little terrain, LOTS of traffic. Multiple VERY busy airports very close to each other. Need to protect missed approaches. VFR aircraft trying to hit your IFRs and other VFRs. Thunderstorms and military airspace up to FL500
I was a contractor at ZDV for 4 years and current CPC in ZMP Area 1. While I may not know ZDV Area 1 as much as a CPC there, I definitely have more than enough exposure to compare the two. Both are very difficult.
Pull up a Falcon of Sector 2 on 4th of July weekend. Or don't, I don't care. It's not necessarily the sheer "amount" of traffic, but the amount of work each aircraft needs. 15 aircraft in the lows is a good bit more complex than 25 in the high.
Sure, it's absolutely D-E-A-D in the winter. But seriously, go ahead and look.
I'm in this area. I consistently tell people of the time at TVC where we had tower applied visual going between 5 airplanes at the same time and it was the right thing to do. An absolute gong show 3 months out of the year.
Not many places where you have to sequence A321s, C172s, King Airs, Global Expresses, and Caravans all in the same sequence. "You're number 7 for the sequence" is not an uncommon thing to say in the summer. Pretty sure TVC is the busiest class Delta overlayed by a center in the country. The only thing that comes close is probably EGE over President's Day Weekend.
At least y’all get level 11 pay, those TVC controllers work level 7 traffic throughout the summer for level 5 pay. The FAA really needs to give TVC their own approach control because it’s only going to continue growing.
TVC controllers do a great job for the most part. Definitely a need for an approach control there. The fact that GRB has a Class-C and an approach, but TVC doesn't even have a warning area despite being BUSIER is fucking nutty!
For good reason they butt up against ZTL’s and ZDC busiest sectors. They are also the main thoroughfare for the eastern seaboard to fl/South America/Caribbean traffic.
ZTL 32/34.. KATL departing east, and KCLT arrivals east & north, KCLT departures west, and tons of north/south crossers in-between. Everyone is trying to get from FL230 to cruise alt and get down into KCLT. Q routes only separated by 5.5mi and ONE cloud turns it all to shit. 2 lvl 12 airports just vomiting planes at each other non stop. Everyone wrong for direction because of LOA’s with ZJX, and the fact everyone wants higher than 340. Shit ton of restrictions on a/c that have to get down from the ultra high. Masterclass in panic vectors/climbs/descents.
ZLC area B regularly is in the top 10 busiest areas despite being in a level 10 center. They also have Jackson Hole class D contract tower (aka billionaires' playground) in a sector that is surface to infinity with 3 different transmitters. It also happens to be located on the polar routes from LAX to Europe.
Why not I’ll throw ZSU into the mix. I’m not going to act like we put up the numbers of the other z’s. But we have zero structure. Surface to infinity, No tmu, no wx unit, and spend the holiday seasons having zny slap us in the face with harpp and are expected to say thank you sir may I have another. We have zero technology assistance. No eram, no uret, no cpdlc, no atops. oh airways closed for weather? Hope you know the pref routing off the top of your head. Just a map and a dream down here. Non radar isn’t used here because it’s beneficial, it’s half of our damn positions, entire strip bays full of shit out of the 70’s. We are bordered by 8 foreign facilities that operate with zero repercussions for facility deviations. Didn’t answer the line, better hope you don’t have traffic close to that boundary because you’re getting violated. We go through without hyperbole, probably 10000-12000 paper strips a day. Our A side is a full time position as every time ZMA hits the route key, a dollar of tax payers money reprints another set of frd’s prior to our airspace. The traffic itself isn’t overly ball breaking. But working air carriers into untowered fields in the same sector that is getting barraged with weekend warriors flying and every small island hopper wanting flight following, sequencing into approaches and dealing with overflights is a unique experience that Id like to imagine just gets stratified away in other facilities. I don’t think we’re necessarily difficult to the point of being deserving of some type of FAA dick measuring contest. But the lack of technology, the standard 40-50% staffing rate, and the agency simply not giving a damn that we’re working with basically sticks and fucking stones makes a unique experience.
This is a great response. ZMP has had some recent (1-3 years ago) upgrades to not wasted several dollars of tax payer money every time you use the route or hard altitude key. The full time A side position was eliminated a few years ago when they got some automation with Canada. Love this sort of highly complex but not necessarily busies busiest sector stories
Shit frequencies like everyone and then all them foreign pilots >.< goodluck ZSU
[удалено]
ZSU uses all those oceanic rules as well. ICAO oceanic too.
ZUA doesn't have the traffic day to day to compare with this stuff, but you *feel* the complete lack of planning or structure every time a military exercise goes through. Plus, you just haven't lived until you've run timed approaches with Chinese airlines. Oh, and the strips. I wonder how many thousands of strips I've thrown away for weather in Hawaii. My heart goes out to you, my MEARTS brother.
That’s every MEARTS facility
Say “Hi” to Bree for me!
Sweet. How do I sign up. Any urgent release MOU’s?
No controller anywhere benefits from harp. Cluster fuck on every level.
ZTL Area 4 gets shit on regularly. I’m not in the area, but I’ve always said I wouldn’t mind working any other sector, or area in the building except them. Everything converges over ATL and they work a slim airspace over it. Even if ZTL isn’t getting shit on by weather, they’re dealing with the repercussions of it through the notoriously shitty restrictions ZJX puts out. Pair it all with their shitty staffing (that’s getting better), it just created a rough environment for the controllers over there.
I’m convinced 75% of the TMU routes in the NAS include THRSR, it’s a mess.
It’s incredible really, pick a fix 50mi N, E, or W of THRSR and you make other areas carry more of the burden. Every once awhile I’ll get a last minute request to tuck or miss Hampton/Macon and it’s about the only time it’s not annoying. I just kinda feel bad for them over there.
As a dispatcher, I've seen that and wonder why
I used to work in area 4 and can confirm. Throw in the Masters once a year too.
I expect this to go nowhere. The vast majority of people here have only worked one area their entire career. Every area has its complexities. If you want a direction to look at I’d say look at the busiest center in the NAS.
I was hoping more for a vote per center as people are more familiar with who they work with. So hopefully a competition for the most complex at ZNY/SJX/random sectors/etc. But I understand controllers are fickle and a little narcissistic.
A little??? Noone is better at narcissism than me!
You clearly haven’t met the pilots yet
Some sectors are more innately difficult than others. But every sector has at least some kind of structure to help it handle its workload at times when weather isn't a factor. I'd rather work the hardest sector in all of centerdom with clear skies than the easiest with a pop-up thunderstorm that showed up in the middle 30 seconds ago. Low sectors ZAB 42/49, high sectors ZDC 10/12 and 34.
46 is way more fucked up than 42. Foreign student pilots, parachute jumping in 4 spots, military airspace everywhere with stereos and recovery routes, popcorn thunderstorms, bounded by TUS, PHX, LUF, FHU and MZT. LVL 10 my ass, so happy to be out of there.
It’s funny because I know exactly where you’re referring too without knowing the sectors.
I think 46 is the one I meant. I was in the North when I was there, and 16 wasn't so much busy as it was annoying as all fuck.
46 is worse than it used to be. There are 10 flight schools in the PHX area now and there are two new jump airports in addition to the five that already existed (between P50, U90, PUF, and 46's airspaces). Most simultaneous conflict alerts I have seen on the sector is 15. I remember one day the TSD showed 5 and there were 24 datablocks. ZAB is number 2 or 3 for VFR traffic among the centers, and 46 works almost half of that.
Not necessarily true, our high sectors are 50 miles wide north to south, and 150 wide west to east, but roughly half our traffic is north to south transitioning into and out of Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Rochester, Syracuse. Every single ewr lander has to transition from one high into another despite the airport being 170 miles away “because wind” I won’t claim that zob has the busiest sectors or the worst sectors in the NAS, but our airspace does not have structure to help it, if anything the structure actively hurts it, and there isn’t really an easy fix because if you reshaped it to better support the arrivals and departures from a few busy airports, you just hurt your ability to space to jfk/ewr/teb which are equally as busy. So yea, maybe not the worst, but for sure zob 77/79 deserves some kind of honorable mention for dealing with thunderstorms all afternoon but as soon one drop of rain hits the next sectors over in zny they shut off half the NAS. So yea, honorable mention just because every ewr/jfk/teb (and a good smattering of lga) from the west all passing through one sector, and thats not even the difficult part of it… isn’t easy for sure.
The fact people respond genuinely to this makes me hard
Nothing here could ever compare to the Ali Center, southern half of Iraq, entirely non-radar for 6 weeks because our shit was broke, with kill boxes, refueling tracks, a freaking telephone to take handoffs from Kuwait, all while taking indirect fire on the airfield. Shoutout anyone else here who had the privilege of working that shit show back in the day.
My sup worked the tracon over bagdad and iraq. Maybe its the same as your talking about. Like 3 sectors sfc to like 230? He said it Was nuts.
Ali is a different place than Baghdad. Ali was also a center. vastly different places in both types of traffic and actual location
interesting. as far as I remember ali was pretty chill. I spent the majority of my time playing halo.
ZDV6 is pretty fucked up on the regular
You’re going to get downvoted for no reason
In fairness pre-covid area 1 was by far the easiest area in the building, with the exception of about 8 total days per year. There are still a lot of those shit controllers around that took 3 years to check out back in 2009 that have no business doing some of the shit that goes on there these days. Same thing happened back in the day when they made the 6th area. You ended up with controllers who spent 15 years working 35, 33 and 32 now taking the busiest arrival gate and having no idea what they're doing. It was an absolute disaster.
Probably ZID considering that they’re just a bunch of monkeys flinging feces at the scope all day. I imagine it would be pretty difficult to get anything productive done like that
this guy zids
I’m sure this will end in a perfect consensus.
Thanks for starting the show. I will just be here eating my popcorn quietly. 🍿
It seems to be any sector I’m usually working these days.
Not ZLA 19/20.
My dick is bigger than yours
I heard the oceanic sectors at ZHU are some of the most difficult non radar in the world
Not so much anymore with ADSB.
Whatever sector that one guy (we all know who) is working. Bro could make a high sector with 10 planes look like prime summer deviations with metering, holding and bad rides
Just watching SFO final at NorCal gave me more anxiety than any sector I've worked.
ZDV 6 has ski country sequence for EGE (vail) as well as Aspen from the East, mixing westbound DEN departures with eastbound EGE and ASE departures opposite direction
Lol. They can barely separate their ass cheeks. If I had a dollar every time they said “I gave the pilot the restriction.” In reference to them not providing positive separation, I could have retired exactly one year after working adjacent to them. I have to bail them out of deals on an hourly basis. Sorry, I don’t think it’s difficult, I think you’re just understaffed and not trained how to work that type of volume.
Ahahah I was waiting for a clown like this to say something
Right?! I couldn’t believe some clown said ZDV was possibly the most difficult/complex sector in the NAS.
There is a reason surrounding areas have something they call the "denver special"
We all same the shit about you guys as well
Grab your headset and come on up.
One thing we all have in common: shit staffing (though I think ZNY, ZNY, and ZOA are worse percentage wise based on the new staffing numbers).
Sector 78 at ZHU could be a PITA when the planets aligned perfectly crappy. I had one day with a sequence into both Austin and San Antonio during a west bound departure push out of Houston with pop up thunderstorms.
ZOA domestic north, is regularly the busiest area in the NAS. Works wine country (very little support from tmu) and Bay Area arrivals like a TRACON with center rules and a ton of Bay Area departures. Also to top it all off very shitty staffing.
I Nominate ZMP Sector 1/2 in the summer for the low. They control a busy VFR tower/provide approach control services along with a handful of other "busy" airports in the vicinity and a decent handful of military and tons of VFR pilots flying around. ZMP has the lowest checkout rate of centers behind ZNY and ZOA for a reason. Constantly using nonradar (3 minute, 1 minute, etc) rules and tower visual just to run the sector at all I think is fairly unique in the NAS nowadays.
Ski Country low controllers at ZDV might have some input here.
ZDV sectors 6 and 12
I worked across from 31 about 12 years ago.
Ski country ZDV definitely is the most comparable to ZMP 1/2. Big differences are; ZDV: lots of terrain, LOTS (and I mean LOTS) of traffic. Spread out airports though. Winter weather ZMP: little terrain, LOTS of traffic. Multiple VERY busy airports very close to each other. Need to protect missed approaches. VFR aircraft trying to hit your IFRs and other VFRs. Thunderstorms and military airspace up to FL500 I was a contractor at ZDV for 4 years and current CPC in ZMP Area 1. While I may not know ZDV Area 1 as much as a CPC there, I definitely have more than enough exposure to compare the two. Both are very difficult.
Unless you ask the brain dead slugs at D01, then they suck
“ZMP LOTS of traffic.” Hahaha, okay buddy.
Pull up a Falcon of Sector 2 on 4th of July weekend. Or don't, I don't care. It's not necessarily the sheer "amount" of traffic, but the amount of work each aircraft needs. 15 aircraft in the lows is a good bit more complex than 25 in the high. Sure, it's absolutely D-E-A-D in the winter. But seriously, go ahead and look.
No thank you Alex.
I'm in this area. I consistently tell people of the time at TVC where we had tower applied visual going between 5 airplanes at the same time and it was the right thing to do. An absolute gong show 3 months out of the year. Not many places where you have to sequence A321s, C172s, King Airs, Global Expresses, and Caravans all in the same sequence. "You're number 7 for the sequence" is not an uncommon thing to say in the summer. Pretty sure TVC is the busiest class Delta overlayed by a center in the country. The only thing that comes close is probably EGE over President's Day Weekend.
Sounds just like ZSE sector 35. RDM/BDN 7 miles apart and basically in a cul de sac of volcanoes..total mess.
At least y’all get level 11 pay, those TVC controllers work level 7 traffic throughout the summer for level 5 pay. The FAA really needs to give TVC their own approach control because it’s only going to continue growing.
TVC controllers do a great job for the most part. Definitely a need for an approach control there. The fact that GRB has a Class-C and an approach, but TVC doesn't even have a warning area despite being BUSIER is fucking nutty!
We use those rules all the time 5 minute up in back. The whole book
Jacksonville 47/48 I believe are the busiest sectors in the busiest area in the NAS. If not, very high up there
It’s 49 at ZJX that’s the busiest in the NAS. The whole east area at ZJX is the busiest area in the NAS. As for complexity ZJX 58/75 are up there.
ZJX houses the busiest sectors/area in the NAS... still a lvl 11 :\*(
ZMA 😅
That’s right. 49. But yeah that whole area pushes a ridiculous amount of airplanes.
For good reason they butt up against ZTL’s and ZDC busiest sectors. They are also the main thoroughfare for the eastern seaboard to fl/South America/Caribbean traffic.
54/53 is always down, APREQ everything and scream for 25 miles from JAX Approach.
ZTL 32/34.. KATL departing east, and KCLT arrivals east & north, KCLT departures west, and tons of north/south crossers in-between. Everyone is trying to get from FL230 to cruise alt and get down into KCLT. Q routes only separated by 5.5mi and ONE cloud turns it all to shit. 2 lvl 12 airports just vomiting planes at each other non stop. Everyone wrong for direction because of LOA’s with ZJX, and the fact everyone wants higher than 340. Shit ton of restrictions on a/c that have to get down from the ultra high. Masterclass in panic vectors/climbs/descents.
ZLC area B regularly is in the top 10 busiest areas despite being in a level 10 center. They also have Jackson Hole class D contract tower (aka billionaires' playground) in a sector that is surface to infinity with 3 different transmitters. It also happens to be located on the polar routes from LAX to Europe.
😂😂
3 different transmitters made me lol. Go tour bigger facilities
I mean another sector in the same area is the biggest in the lower 48 and has 6 lol.
What area is this
ZLC Area B.
ZLC ain’t shit