Narrative:

We were extremely short staffed going into a holiday weekend with extensive thunderstorms. I was working two sectors combined and most or all of the routes going in to ZNY were shut down due to the weather. When the weather moved to the east; ZNY opened the routes up and our tmu (traffic management unit) let bos and other airports start departing planes. The problem with that was the weather was directly in my sector. Almost every aircraft needed weather deviations. There was arrival traffic to pvd; cape; and island flights to ny metro airports and various other random traffic. The situation was already very complex and challenging; having to try to issue weather and approve deviations for almost every plane; but it was made worse by the fact that quite a few planes didn't have correct route off the ground. I was taking handoffs from approach and having to issue complete long routes. In one instance the aircraft's flight plan showed the correct re-route but that wasn't what he had from approach. I was working the combined sector at the time without an assist position. Another controller was relieved from D46 and come over to tell me about a re-route one of my planes needed. He realized how busy I was and ended up sitting on my radar assist position for quite some time. During this session I was dangerously overloaded. I had a plane enter sector 18's airspace without a handoff. I called the controller at 18 and they seemed very busy as well and was talking with an approach control about something else on the landline. I had to break for control to ask them to accept the handoff. I also had an aircraft off of bed that as far as I remember; never checked in with me. They were on a 270 heading and level at 14000 feet a little north of baf in sector 36's airspace. I'm not sure if they were ever in my airspace at all; but by the time I noticed them they were violating sector 36's airspace. I turned them south bound to get them on course and climbed them only to find out a few minutes later they needed a re-route to the west. I ended up having to completely shut off bos departures on my own initiative. We did not have the staffing to split the sectors and there was no other way I saw that could make the sectors safe and manageable. I do not have any exact times or call signs as the night was too busy to write things like that down and our staffing; even today; doesn't support me being able to go through a falcon review of the session. The time may be off by an hour or more; I'm not sure. In my opinion; there were two causes to this situation. Tmu failed tremendously that night. And it wasn't a onetime thing. It's the norm when we have difficult/complex traffic or weather. They opened up bos and cape and island departures when there are thunderstorms and extreme precipitation in bosox sector. The only way departures should have been let go is with very conservative in-trail restrictions to start with to insure that aircraft were getting through. Also the aircraft should have had the correct routes on the ground. The other issue is our staffing. We are routinely understaffed. We don't have enough people to run the area safely during busy times and it has to be very bad for management to call in overtime. When they do; it is frequently not enough. The night of this incident we only had 2 people scheduled on the mid shift and a 3rd on overtime was denied. It was so busy however that we had to hold over 4 people. I was one of them and when I left; we still had 4 positions open (normally at this time we would be down to 1 in our area). It's nice that they did the hold over overtime; but it is dangerous to have 2 people scheduled for an overnight shift in the summertime. Traffic is too heavy and things are too complex for this to be considered adequate.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: A Controller's sector and workload became oversaturated with traffic due to weather deviations and aircraft needing routing corrections. The Controller stated the Traffic Management Unit did not effectively manage the traffic flows through their airspace.

Narrative: We were extremely short staffed going into a holiday weekend with extensive thunderstorms. I was working two sectors combined and most or all of the routes going in to ZNY were shut down due to the weather. When the weather moved to the east; ZNY opened the routes up and our TMU (Traffic Management Unit) let BOS and other airports start departing planes. The problem with that was the weather was directly in my sector. Almost every aircraft needed weather deviations. There was arrival traffic to PVD; cape; and island flights to NY metro airports and various other random traffic. The situation was already very complex and challenging; having to try to issue weather and approve deviations for almost every plane; but it was made worse by the fact that quite a few planes didn't have correct route off the ground. I was taking handoffs from approach and having to issue complete long routes. In one instance the aircraft's flight plan showed the correct re-route but that wasn't what he had from approach. I was working the combined sector at the time without an Assist position. Another controller was relieved from D46 and come over to tell me about a re-route one of my planes needed. He realized how busy I was and ended up sitting on my radar Assist position for quite some time. During this session I was dangerously overloaded. I had a plane enter sector 18's airspace without a handoff. I called the controller at 18 and they seemed very busy as well and was talking with an approach control about something else on the landline. I had to break for control to ask them to accept the handoff. I also had an aircraft off of BED that as far as I remember; never checked in with me. They were on a 270 heading and level at 14000 feet a little north of BAF in sector 36's airspace. I'm not sure if they were ever in my airspace at all; but by the time I noticed them they were violating sector 36's airspace. I turned them south bound to get them on course and climbed them only to find out a few minutes later they needed a re-route to the west. I ended up having to completely shut off BOS departures on my own initiative. We did not have the staffing to split the sectors and there was no other way I saw that could make the sectors safe and manageable. I do not have any exact times or call signs as the night was too busy to write things like that down and our staffing; even today; doesn't support me being able to go through a Falcon review of the session. The time may be off by an hour or more; I'm not sure. In my opinion; there were two causes to this situation. TMU failed tremendously that night. And it wasn't a onetime thing. It's the norm when we have difficult/complex traffic or weather. They opened up BOS and Cape and island departures when there are thunderstorms and extreme precipitation in BOSOX sector. The only way departures should have been let go is with very conservative in-trail restrictions to start with to insure that aircraft were getting through. Also the aircraft should have had the correct routes on the ground. The other issue is our staffing. We are routinely understaffed. We don't have enough people to run the area safely during busy times and it has to be very bad for management to call in overtime. When they do; it is frequently not enough. The night of this incident we only had 2 people scheduled on the mid shift and a 3rd on overtime was denied. It was so busy however that we had to hold over 4 people. I was one of them and when I left; we still had 4 positions open (normally at this time we would be down to 1 in our area). It's nice that they did the hold over overtime; but it is dangerous to have 2 people scheduled for an overnight shift in the summertime. Traffic is too heavy and things are too complex for this to be considered adequate.

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.