Originally Posted by
SWBKCB
But if the 127 had completed their training they would have increased the pool of available controllers at a time of national (international?) shortage and allow people to move around the system. Yes, maybe the current shortage couldn't be predicted, but binning people so near to the end of training looks short sighted.
It was explained earlier that NERL (the regulated business) can’t recruit and train controllers and then pass them to NATS solutions (the low cost arm? which recently won the gatwick contract) because that would give an unfair commercial advantage to NATS solutions.
Like it or not, ATC at airfields is a competitive environment.
Perhaps it’s this race to cut costs and win contracts that caused the staff shortages at Gatwick which NATS very recently inherited from the previous ATC provider.