Narrative:

The area was short staffed. We only had 8 controllers to start the shift. The supervisor left on leave so a controller in charge was stood up. As the evening went on every time I plugged in I would almost reach two hours on position. Other controllers did reach two hours or more. At one point sectors 20; 63; and 78 were combined up to give relief to a controller that was there on overtime and had been on position for more than 2 hours [without] a break. This resulted in the combined sector being red for well over an hour straight. The controller working the sector was given a trainee that was not certified on one of the sectors that were combined as a d-side. The controller working the red sectors ended up on position for over two hours by himself. On top of that we were given reroutes for aircraft from tmu; but the points [where] the reroute took place were well inside ZFW center and there was no reason for us to give the change especially with the current workload. The new policy in the building during the day is that controllers are not allowed to work red sectors so we continually split sectors and we are told that tmu is doing something. Now we have controllers who are not used to working this volume of traffic and I feel as if tmu did nothing because they were still asking us to do more and they were going home anyway. This was probably one of the worst situations I have seen of not caring about the controllers from management. It repeatedly happens on the mid. Management is always acting concerned about volume when upper management is there during the day but not on the mid when they are at home.the fix to this would be to staff to 10 on a swing as this is not the first time that we had to hold people over because we are short staffed on the swing.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: ZAB Controller reported of short staffing and management's policy related to working traffic when the sector is in the red (Monitor Alert Parameter). Controller would like to see shift staffing up to what the requested numbers are.

Narrative: The area was short staffed. We only had 8 controllers to start the shift. The Supervisor left on leave so a CIC was stood up. As the evening went on every time I plugged in I would almost reach two hours on position. Other controllers did reach two hours or more. At one point sectors 20; 63; and 78 were combined up to give relief to a controller that was there on overtime and had been on position for more than 2 hours [without] a break. This resulted in the combined sector being red for well over an hour straight. The Controller working the sector was given a trainee that was not certified on one of the sectors that were combined as a D-side. The controller working the red sectors ended up on position for over two hours by himself. On top of that we were given reroutes for aircraft from TMU; but the points [where] the reroute took place were well inside ZFW center and there was no reason for us to give the change especially with the current workload. The new policy in the building during the day is that controllers are not allowed to work red sectors so we continually split sectors and we are told that TMU is doing something. Now we have controllers who are not used to working this volume of traffic and I feel as if TMU did nothing because they were still asking us to do more and they were going home anyway. This was probably one of the worst situations I have seen of not caring about the controllers from management. It repeatedly happens on the mid. Management is always acting concerned about volume when upper management is there during the day but not on the mid when they are at home.The fix to this would be to staff to 10 on a swing as this is not the first time that we had to hold people over because we are short staffed on the swing.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.