Originally Posted by
escaped.atco
Ultimately NATS is now a commercial business and as such has to return a profit to the shareholders. If your customers have decreased their own business dramatically and as a result you are struggling to raise revenue then redundancies and cutbacks are inevitable. The airlines that are making massive changes at present are a pertinent example and I feel desperately sorry for those affected.
In my humble opinion, national infrastructure like ATC should be a government role. What happens if NATS goes under? What happens if the revenue incoming is drastically less than company outgoings, not just for a few months but potentially a few years?
I have no idea how many staff NATS employ. I have no idea how many of those staff are ATCOs and how many are office types. I have no idea of how many they are wishing to sack. Did NATS not go through this process a few years ago with airport controllers? IIRC they got rid of quite a few not that long ago.
Staff costs ( from last years returns ) were running at near enough 1B per annum.