Originally Posted by
ATC Watcher
Amazing remarks. I like the police comparison by the way , so if an airline has a shortage of pilots , he could go into an aeroclub and put C152s pilots instead ?, and if you are short of staff in Gatwick you can take a guy from the UAE above 40 years old ( if they had 20 years experience they would be at least that old ) to pass OJT in a high density facility ? You know the time it takes to train and the failure rate of a conversion controller above 40 ?
as a non Brit I fail to understand this NATS complexity. Sounds ;like a banking verbiage to avoid taxes and responsibility . Are these companies also registered in funny countries? .
For me , the UK put Gatwick ATC for auction some years ago , the DFS got it, but took over the controllers., Then the DFS stopped before the end of the contract (not a surprise if you know how the DFS works) so it came back to NATS, again with the same staff . So for me the current controller situation has nothing to do with this musical chair exercise , or does it ?
For the benefit of our foreign readers, and some UK ones too.
In the UK ATC at Airports is the "responsibility" of the Airport. Some Airports choose to provide their own ATC others contract that out to a "specialist" ATC provider. The number varies from time to time but there are about 50 Air Navigation Service Providers recognised by the CAA. The Airport is free to choose on whatever terms it feels are appropriate and the Service Level Agreement will depend upon what they are willing to pay for. It is ultimately the Airports problem if the supplier fails to deliver but it isn't without risk for the ANSP either. The public will expect an expensive ATC service even if the airport doesn't pay for one. And in the Gatwick case although some here have convinced themselves it is all the fault of NATS and others have decided it isn't in any way the fault of NATS, the public are totally convinced it's the fault of NATS. Although NATS regularly gets blamed for issues at airports it has never provide the ATC service for.
En-Route ATC is the "responsibility" of the UK Government. It issues a licence to an ATC Provider to provide that service. The licence lasts for about 15 years and the terms of that licence are re-negotiated every 5 years. Currently that licence is held by NATS through its NERL subsidary.
Because En_Route ATC is quite a large business compared to Airport ATC there was concern that the holder of that licence could use the income from that to subsidise its Airport Business and compete unfairly. To prevent that NATS is required to run the part of its business that controls en-route airspace (NERL) as a different financial entity to the part of its business that competes against others for Airport's business (NSL). There was also the problem that NERL's profits are regulated and ultimately any excess profit is returned to the customer. That's fine for a regulated monopoly but where NATS operates commercially and competes against others it would have no incentive to compete if any profit was taken away.
NATS staff are in the main actually employed by a parent company and then "charged" out to one of the two subsidaries depending on their role. The total costs of any staff used in NSL have to be paid for by the NSL subsidary.
If you win a contract at an Airport previously held by another company you are almost certainly going to inherit most of the staff. They will be on different terms and conditions to NSL staff. Not necessarily worse but different. Merging two different sets of terms and conditions is difficult but you'd have to do that to bring those staff into NSL. To avoid that problem NATS chooses to bid for that business through NATS Solutions rather than NSL. NATS Solutions doesn't have the collective bargaining terms and conditions that NSL has so it can bring staff across much easier and indeed transfer them away again if it later loses the contract. That arrangement is not unique to NATS. DFS bid for Gatwick and Edinburgh through their subsidary ANS which was set up for pretty much the same reasons.
All these companies are UK registered at the same address although nowadays the "brass plate" is some letraset on a window.
It wasn't the UK that put Gatwick up for auction. Gatwick is a private company owned by shareholders. None of those shareholders are actually British so it was actually a foreign owned entity that selected a subsidary of a company wholly owned by the German Government to provide their ATC service.
We don't know, because it isn't in the public domain, exactly when the problems started at Gatwick. Without knowing that we don't know whether it is NATS or ANS or Both who are responsible.