I’ll hop in the pissing contest. For the year consecutive I was at HWO (was there for 15 months total but for traffic count purposes) we did almost 350k operations. Six controllers, 6/10s, a manager who worked 2 hours a day and took Friday's off, open 7a-9p. I think we ranked 28th overall traffic count wise in the NAS. The same year I think IWA did something like 275k?
You can go to YouTube and search “HWO crash” and you’ll find pages upon pages of news segments as well as the infamous cockpit video of the student who has the GoPro mounted, bounced down the runway, and ended up nose down in the grass.
There are many issues with the entire setup. Idk how staffing numbers are now, nor traffic volume because I know they had some construction slated but I was listing to GC on LiveATC the other day and the all familiar “do not call me, if you are on the ground I will call you first otherwise maintain radio silence.” So it seems they’re still kicking. We had 6 controllers in the facility. We’d have 2 openers and 2 closers with an overlap in the middle (1115a-345p) where the openers would have enough time to make a head break, grab more water, and hop back on position to split off LC for a little while (had 2 LC positions, one for each parallel but rarely were able to de-combine due to staffing.) So a small crew of controllers often pushing 150 op hours on LC where you have 10-20 in the pattern on each side and pressure from corporate and county to increase numbers for some ungodly reason. FLL next door was pushing similar numbers with straight in AC ops and open 24/7 while having something like 25 on staff, making more working 40 hour weeks than we were making working 60. Time off? Kick rocks. Don’t even think about submitting a leave request. Transfer? We can’t even staff the facility.
I don’t know anything about IWA but I can make the argument for HWO until I’m blue in the face. Fuck that place.
