Originally Posted by
fireflybob
Some of us are old enough to recall 30 odd years ago or more where the UK had military master diversion airfields which were open H24, fully manned and equipped with surveillance and talk down radar and also the ability to lay a foam carpet within 30 minutes if you needed to do a wheels up landing.
Now because of a paucity of such stations which are open H24 (peacetime Air Force now where the enemy doesn't attack at the weekends, bank holidays or outside office hours) there are times when vast swathes of the FIR is devoid of any radar service.
There's now only one military airfield that provides an H24 LARS service, and the reason why remains a mystery. It has four based aircraft - Tutors, that never fly beyond the airfield's opening hours of 9 to 5; the airfield for which they are the diversionary airfield is only open weekdays 0800-1800 plus as required for QRA; and 90% of the LARS traffic is light civil aircraft on a Basic Service.
Why they can't have one person on standby to go in and provide a radar service in the event of Lossiemouth going below minima while a QRA flight is out beats me. And we're all paying for this bizarre pantomime of full ATC teams sitting around all night drinking tea waiting for an event that may never happen.