So basically I had best of both worlds, as I enjoyed the summer in two hemispheres. I pulled together all my working days as far as possible and essentially worked only during the European summer, a few weeks around Christmas and a few weeks in February, and spent the rest of the time in Australia with my family. I decided to start commuting between the Netherlands and Australia.
In 2010, I left the training section, as a new roster was implemented which allowed much greater flexibility than was previously possible. My career progressed at EUROCONTROL firstly as an on-the-job officer refresher trainer and afterwards a team leader in the training section. I successfully completed my training on the DECO sectors in 2002. I started with EUROCONTROL in July 2001 with four other conversion controllers and was attached to an ab initio course and assigned to the DECO sectors. The Director General had apparently decided to waive the criteria regarding nationality -(Australia is not a Member State of EUROCONTROL)- and so I decided to apply. In 2000, I read an article about EUROCONTROL in Flight International magazine. I intended to remain an Australian ATCO and maybe move into the tower or approach stream over time but things changed. In 1995, the en route sectors were being merged between two centres (Brisbane and Melbourne) and my en route sectors were moved from Sydney to Brisbane. I was subsequently checked out as an air traffic controller in Sydney in 1993. However, this post was being phased out, so my employer (the civil aviation authority) offered me two options: redundancy or retraining as a civil ATCO via a conversion course at the University of Tasmania.
I started my career as a flight service officer in Australia in 1989.
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