The redundancy requirement still kills the possibility of making 3 crews work at a lot of level 4-6 facilities. Even if a 16 or 18-hour facility combined to a single position but you needed 3 CICs during most of the day to protect against ATC limited, you'd need 18 CICs to have 3 crews of 6.
I'm going to write this out and see if I can come up with something coherent... my facility is open 16 hours a day. We only ever staff two positions, tower and radar, which can theoretically be combined into one single person if traffic is light enough.
So let’s say, absolute bare bones, you run two people per shift—you combine up into one person for lunch/as needed but otherwise your TOP is going to be close to 8 hours a day, we’re in an emergency so suck it up. Now you need a morning shift (2) and an evening shift (2). Ideally you want to have A/B/C crews, five on ten off, so that’s 12 people. I don’t think we’re quite at 12 CPCs, but we’re close, and you can have the two supes be part the schedule so that drops you down to 10 CPCs needed (assuming all CPCs also have their CIC).
But maybe you don’t want to run quite so close to the edge, in case someone gets COVID and their buddy (and possibly their morning/evening counterparts) needs to be quarantined. So drop back down to just A/B crews, five on five off, now you need 8 CPCs (or only 6 if the supes are in the mix) and the rest of your facility, which is maybe another two or three bodies, can be at home on standby for when someone tests positive.
So yeah, theoretically doable. It would suck pretty bad though. And like you said, if you need 24-hour staffing now you have to have 18 CPCs. Ouch.
Same here, they've shot down the ideas of a standalone in the tower (which traffic is dead so why not) and closing the mids.
Well, that throws a wrench in my brilliant plan.