It’s been quite interesting following this thread over the past few days looking at the style of reply. The thread started out with a post notifying that AIPA, AFAP and Civilair had signed a joint letter to the Minister stating (paraphrasing) that the original stated reasons for undertaking the airspace change were being demonstrated and requesting an urgent meeting to discuss the progress or not of the transition.
Replies for the first couple of days seemed to be supportive of this position, presumably with posts from ATCs and Regional/RPT pilots. The thread was obviously a sleeper until a little vigorous argument came from BIK 116.8. Over the past 2 days posts have more than doubled and today marks the start of print, radio and presumably television coverage on the issue (although sheep in the Middle East is still bigger).
I was deeply offended to read that one of my fellow aviation enthusiasts would seek to exclude ATCs from discussing issues that affect every day of their working lives. Despite some of the opinions expressed here ATCs are not focussed on destruction of the industry. Our livelihood depends on the livelihood of the aviation community at large. Similarly I cannot believe that someone can so lightly write off the combined opinions of 3 professional associations by saying that:
A letter with 6000 members hey???
Well I am penning one that effectively negates that, on AOPA letterhead.
and goes on to say that:
More GA pilots than RPT = more votes.
The letter that started all this doesn’t say NAS is a crock of sh!t. It doesn’t say we’re all going to die. What the letter says is that if the premise we went into this for is not occurring, why are we proceeding? In other words “Please explain”.
My personal opinion is that we’re giving away a lot more than we’ll gain. Most of the controllers I know don’t support the airspace changes but even though we didn’t ask for it, we’re all doing the training, sacrificing days off and break time, in order the meet the mandated cutover dates. The bottom line is that we’re not going to die if it goes wrong but we sure as hell don’t want to sit by and watch some poor b@stards run together and die to prove our point.
There are enough people questioning the process to warrant further discussion. If you presented any politician with a petition of 6000 signatures on what, to the public, is a limited interest topic, they’d start jumping. The fact that there are more GA pilots out presumes that they all agree that NAS is a good idea. Equally the letter from the unions does not imply that that all of the membership thinks that NAS sucks. Open discussion is healthy, we won’t solve it here but at least we get an idea of what people think (however wrong they may be if they have a different opinion to me).
I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t think it’s going to save money and the CEO of Airservices is of the same opinion. Dick has started promising additional towers that haven’t been costed which means additional airspace regulations at these locations. I don’t l know if I’m right but I’m enjoying the discussions