Originally Posted by
Gonzo
It's a difficult question to answer.
ATC is an interesting job, so I would expect you'd enjoy and find it rewarding whichever path you went down, be it airports (if trained at Gloucester) or en-route centres (if trained at CTC near Swanwick).
It might be better to ask yourself where you'd prefer to end up working, at an en-route centre with hundreds of colleagues, or at an airport where you might be at Heathrow with 60 other controllers, or a smaller airport where you might have 20 or even fewer colleagues. Where in the country do you want to work? If en-route ATC, then you'll be working at Swanwick or Prestwick. NATS of course has airport units all over the UK (and Gibraltar!). If you like being 'around' aviation, then you might prefer working at an airport. If that's not so important, en-route has less variation in progression up the salary scale than the airports (which are divided up into salary bands).
While I would have loved to control radar, I would not have wanted to give up working Tower at a busy airport to do so.
For salary and progression tower is better?