Airdrop,
If you don’t mind an FC sticking his nose back into what I agree is essentially an Ops Spt (ATC) thread!!
To come back to something I touched on earlier, you guys ought to get your Gp staff to wander down the corridor to our Gp staffs’ end! Our lot are moving us out of the bunkers, have increased our expeditionary capabilities, given us extra radars, improved some of the existing capabilities, introduced totally new (and actually pretty good) equipment, gone to single phase training and also not done too bad a job of keeping us on the E-3. I for one am fairly happy with most of the Gp driven inputs that have appeared in recent years. (Please note: I’m not a Gp groupie! (Ha, ha!!), have always been a coal face controller type and would certainly not pretend that everything Gp does is great.)
Totally agree that, as it appears to an outsider, the blokes formerly known as MATO need to act pronto before the mil presence at ACCs is seen as too expensive for the bean counters. Surely FTRS is the cheapest way to provide a uniformed mil area function? If a uniformed presence is not required, is it cheaper to pay NATS to do it? Additionally, if you were to lose the slots at Area surely it’s only a short step to someone asking why we must have blue-suiters at our airfields? Also, think of the FI and the Gulf where FC’s have been delegated ‘Area type’ tasks; unavoidable but surely not ideal for the ATC branch?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ATC bashing, but as an outsider I think that the logical conclusion to your own opening post is that eventually we’ll end up with a combined branch. This is regardless of whether or not your high fliers appear! Some of our slots on the E-3 will go to aircrew; some of your slots at Area and / or airfields will surely go. If the Service keeps down-sizing we could also start to lose more slots at our CRCs. Both our critical masses could eventually be too small to maintain fully separate support staff and training and then bingo…..combined branch! Whadya think??
Regards, ADIS