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I'm sorry I didn't find my data board picture, but until I can get one to post, I'll give a little detail about the division of Moncton FIR's airspace for some background on how we work. Without this info, the databoard picture would mean less, anyway.

Every center in Canada has "specialties" within it. These are groups of people who work one or more sectors who tend to do similar tasks frequently, so they don't have to learn too many skill sets. This allows them to be better at what they do regularly. For example, in Moncton, we have Halifax Terminal, which deals with a relatively high volume of traffic and a complex mix of aircraft types in a crossing runway environment. Then we have our high level airspace, which feeds Gander for eastbound oceanic traffic, and receives them from Gander for the westbound flow and feeds them to Boston. This daily flow of traffic one way and then the other involves upwards of 350 aircraft all trying to be in the best spot of the jetstream (or out of it on the westbound leg) within a few hours. This takes a good eye to spot conflicts well in advance, and a number of special procedures and techniques not useable outside this area. Then there's low level which takes up everything else.

While terminal does the fast-paced sequencing and departures, they run more aircraft closer together than anyone else in the CTR. High level handles a shear volume of aircraft all in the high level, Class A airspace. Low level, the catch-all for the remainder, deals with the lowest overall traffic volume, but has the highest complexity for operations and background knowledge required. You don't, for example, see many pilots of 747's and A340's having navigation difficulty, where down low, we see all kinds of pilots from high-timers to "new releases" in all different types of aircraft. Also, our high-level specialty doesn't get involved in arrival vs. departure situations, and their airspace is, by necessity, largely radar-covered and all of their area is controlled airspace. Terminal also is all-radar, and their knowledge base need not be very large to contain the primary airports they deal with. With low level's airspace capped at FL280, we have to know low level airspace and airways, along with high level airspace and airways, and deal with uncontrolled airspace (if a pilot understands the nuances of it, it's pretty easy; it's those that don't that require a lot of attention), as well as at least a basic knowledge about a number of airport situations, frequencies, and so on.

This is what leads to specialization within the job. A certain set of knowledge or skills is required day-in and day-out, and the practice level must be good to deal with the specific sets of circumstances regularly. Traffic flow and geography make a big difference in where internal airspace boundaries are drawn and who works what areas and what traffic. Each specialty may have several sectors as well, and each group's area is divided as traffic dictates the need for. If you look at Moncton ACC's area, the high and low level airspace is very differently divided from one another, all because of where the majority of traffic operates within it. I'll try to find an image of our sectorization that I can post here, too, for information sake.

As a follow up to yesterday's article, I have taken the time to scan a couple of flight progress strips we use in Moncton ACC. I'll show you the grpahics, and then talk about them a little. For those who are familiar with these in general, they'll look a little different from the strips used elsewhere in Canada, since this one was produced by CAATS, our new computer system that is still undergoing testing in Moncton ACC. Let me apologize for the image posting bleeding into the next column. If I made the imade any smaller, I found I was losing intelligibility, and I had difficulty modifying the blog's template due to the background images. We'll just have to suffer a little here.

Here we see the basic enroute strip. This is a westbound flight, and therefore the basic details are printed on the left-hand side. Starting there, we see the aircraft identification (Canjet flight 161), a Medium wake turbulence category Boeing 737-500, the "W" denotes RVSM certification, filed true airspeed of 428 knots. Underneath that is the SSR code assigned to the airplane. Along the bottom row, we see that he departed St. John's, NF (CYYT), and is proceeding from YYT directly to YHZ, with the destination in the far right bottom corner of Halifax International, NS (CYHZ). The "WL16" is formatting code used by CAATS and is not worth explaining. In the box on the far right hand side is the fix posting, ie where we will post this strip in our data board. This strip is meant to posted under our YQY header strip, but since the aircraft isn't actually going over YQY, we post A/YQY, or abeam Sydney VOR, which means near it. Since the fix posting is A/YQY, we show an estimate for the aircraft's passage of YQY of 1948z, and an altitude of FL360. The lone little "1" on the right hand side of the strip denotes this is Revision 1, or Rev1, of this flight plan.

This next example is Air Georgian, or GGN, flight number 7463. Also a medium, it's a Beech 1900 equipped with GPS, filed TAS of 270 knots, assigned code 4345. Notice how all the name and type info is on the right side this time? This is because this aircraft is eastbound. Whether the flight is eastbound or westbound for strip production follows the same rules as for cruising level - eastbound is 000-179° magnetic, and westbound is 180-359°. In any case, look at the bottom line again. The aircraft has filed a cruising altitude of 15,000 feet, is departing CYHZ and flying V312 to CYQY. Again, the EP39 is not worth explaining. In the fix posting box (this time on the far left), you see CYHZ as the fix, therefore this is our departure strip. For that reason, we have a time in the smaller box just to the right of the fix posting box, which shows as the pilot's proposed time of departure from CYHZ, of 1635z. Notice in the box just to the right of the time there is a hand-drawn slash in there. This is how we show departure strips. We would put a cross in this section if the strip were an arrival strip, and leave it blank if it were an enroute strip (such as the example above).

We have a manual of strip marking which tells us what we write, where, and how it's supposed to look to show various details such as who this information has been passed to, what altitudes he has been cleared to, methods of showing changes to routing, and so on. If hte aircraft has been cleared for an approach, this is shown in the box just to the left of the GGN's identification, and so on. But these are the basics of what a strip looks like. If it's desired, perhaps I can demonstrate the progression of some strip marking. Interested?