Isle of Man Sector Review

[aturneruk]

Summary of issue/change

The Isle of Man sector parts are not used within the sector file -- for the purpose of agreements the Isle of Man sector as a whole is used. And for aircraft Euroscope will match the first sector sequentially in the file. We are spending a large number of lines (and increased complexity) to add little, if no, additional features to the sector file.

In my opinion we should either use the granularity of the IoM sectors properly (this means changing all the IoM agreements to specify the correct sector part); or we simplify the IoM sector to one large sector from 0 to FL255 which is effectively what is currently happening.

On another note, can anyone think of a reason why we have additional IoM sectors to those shown on the RW sector diagrams?

Reference (amendment doc/official source/forum) incl. page number(s)

Affected areas of the sector file (if known)

Ownership/TC - MAN/IoM.txt

[aturneruk]

@cpawley @hsugden

Would you be able to share your thoughts on this? I thought the changes to the PC sectors presented an opportunity to look at this too.

[hazzas-99]

I’m not sure I understand what savings we could make?

The reason we have one sector named ‘Isle of Man’ for agreements is because there would be no point in separating them out into the sub-sectors, as we would never split to any level lower than IoM. So rather than relying on EuroScope’s ‘magic’ to agree with an agreement’s sub-sector - which is increasingly temperamental with agreements referring to transitions between sectors vertically rather than laterally - we can just group them together under IoM.

Then I’m not sure what you mean by a single sector from 0 to FL255 - the diagram you screenshotted clearly shows separate sections with different level restraints? There’s also delegated airspace that isn’t shown in the diagram above.

In sum, the sub-sectors do add functionality - ownership! The sector named ‘Isle of Man’ (and I know there are examples similar in LTC) adds simplicity and reliability too.

[cpawley]

Hi Adam,

To help understand the response above, and the sector file, I am adding some more information here.

The "Isle of Man" 0-255 sector is a pseudo-sector used for certain purposes (agreements, sector line display for example)

The others (numbered) correspond to the real airspace this sector uses. This is used to propose handoff order correctly by Euroscope for example - and is especially useful where no agreement exists or aircraft are going into or out of underlying airports.

Euroscope needs to have a contiguous division of our airspace to allow this to happen - e.g. if we took out FL285-FL255 in some places, it would be very confused and propose Unicom for these aircraft.

As Harry mentioned, PC IOM is quite complex, with some delegated parts to Shannon, PX Antrim etc, which is why the division of airspace doesn't exactly match the diagram in the AIP Suppliment you provided.