Many years ago I had the pleasure of working at BRS. At the time the place had a reputation for being unfriendly to GA, in fact there were regular letters in Pilot magazine singling out the unit for its collective attitude. The reputation was well-deserved, with many of the old hands seeing their job as being to protect the local airspace from traffic, especially ‘tiddlers’, that was not inbound or outbound to the airport. Over time, the old guard retired and new blood, who believed in the concept of providing a service to aircraft, came in - and the poor reputation in the eyes of the GA community was, gradually, redeemed. I have no idea what it’s like there nowadays but it is a shame to see what appears to be a poor reputation developing again.
When I was there, it was a great place to do ATC - a great mix of all sorts of aircraft, the CTR/CTA was not connected to the airways system so there was none of this ‘must keep it inside controlled airspace’ malarkey and, for the most part, it was possible to accommodate many of the more conventional requests that pilots made (although, there are one or two requests that stick in my mind and could not be approved). Since then, much has changed, and significantly perhaps, this includes the operator of the unit.
When I started my basic training I can recall being told, during my first few days, that I was privileged to be joining the National Air Traffic Service and that where ever I worked I would be a part of that service. I guess you might call that the ‘Civil Service’ attitude which has become rather outdated in some respects as the years have passed. I’m not really sure how much that view really reflected reality given that there was a very clear State/Non-State distinction made at every turn but when I got out into the real world, in practise, it did not make much difference whether one spoke to a NATS person or one of the others.
At the turn-of-the-century or thereabouts, however, the NATS part of that national service became NATS Ltd (or one of a number of similarly named limited companies), or as some people called them, business entities, or worse, cost centres. What previously had been ATC units became businesses which, amongst other things, had to focus on what it was required to do (because the contract said so) and not to waste money and other resources on things that might be ‘nice to do’ but were not actually required, and more importantly, that the unit was not being paid for.
Maybe what is seen at BRS today is the logical end result of this change.