So, essentially what Greg Russell wants to do is to shift the blame of inadequate planning and expenditure on infrastructure onto the mining companies chartering the aircraft...... Spare me the tears!
FIFO is nothing new... The signs have been there since the late 1980s, and more so in the past ten years.....Why has it taken this long for the penny to drop over there in the oxygen depleted upper echelons of Airservices, and for more pennies to drop from the pockets of WAC and the WA Government?
I would have thought ADSB would have been widespread on the old Perth Sectors by now...God knows they've needed it for a bloody long time. I've only been out of the industry for 12 years and they were talking about implementation pathways then... Why so long to give the controllers and the pilots the tools they need?
Why should mining companies be at fault here? Essentially, any company who changes from a Tuesday or Wednesday morning shift change over is putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage compared to their peers.
<edit>
Making the start times later on the Initial shift won't work, as the first day is generally the handover day between shifts - to give you some idea for a large open pit, think WARRP occurring once a week, and you get some feel on the changes on some pit layouts that need to communicated. The large complex nickel or gold plants aren't any better. The entire shift is generally spent getting up to speed on what has happened in the previous swing and planning for the week ahead, before the previous guy gets on the plane and flies off for R&R.
<end edit>
The race between the mining companies has always been to employ the best people onsite, and changing to a Monday or Friday would be HR suicide for those companies. They are deadly serious about keeping their workers happy and on the payroll at present - those that aren't get their people poached.
By the sounds of it, Greg Russell could take a leaf out of the mining companies books on how to retain people instead of losing them to ANSPs around the world. By the threads seen here and elsewhere, it doesn't sound as if Airservices has been an employer of choice for a while.
Last edited by Gunnadothat; 27th Oct 2011 at 06:15.