Woomera, you state:
If it ain’t broke, won’t save money and diminishes safety, why change?
I thought you might like to look at the very latest figures from the Bureau of Transport Economics. Note that general aviation is continuing to drop in flying hours and the airline industry is continuing to boom.
Airservices makes all its profits from the airline industry and actually loses money by providing a service to general aviation. Despite what is said in other threads, Class C airspace (especially non-radar) often results in VFR aircraft being held or vectored extra distances.
Remember, the difference between success and failure in a small business is quite often small amounts of money. The extra costs of flying in the airspace can have a substantive difference on the success of the general aviation industry.
I believe now the hours are getting so low that we will possibly get into a situation where the whole industry becomes non-viable. This would be a great pity for Australia.
I have heard aircraft attempting to get a VFR clearance across a place like Sydney and the clearance is simply not available. However if the same aircraft files IFR and pays the enroute charge, the clearance is most often immediately available with no delays. Of course, Airservices earns money from IFR flight plans – even in CAVOK conditions – whereas they make no money from VFR enroute flights.
There is obviously a conflict of interest with the organisation that is responsible for the design and allocation of airspace also being responsible for making a profit out of that airspace – especially when the top executives are paid a share of that profit. They have incentives not to provide cost savings to general aviation when they lose money from this.
To put it simply, the airspace system before 27 November 2003 added millions of dollars to the cost of general aviation.
If used correctly, the NAS system has the potential to be very safe and to save general aviation large amounts of money – this will assist the industry to be viable again and employ many more people.