ANSWERS TO CHRIS HIGGINS
1. Listen to Dick Smith and accept much of his experience at Class D airports.
Why accept the opinion of a SINGLE USER of an airspace system. If I drive a car for 30 years does that mean I am qualified to design and build one? Yes we should adopt the BEST from overseas, as far as I can see RHS wants to cherry pick parts of the US NAS without the underlying infrastructure.
2. Build more radar sites in Australia.
Too expensive and completely unnecessary with ADS-B on the way
3. Pour more concrete, if indeed, congestion at airports is really that big a deal.
Clearly you doubt congestion. Next time you visit OZ spent 2-3 hours monitoring an airport at PEAK times. ANY captial city airport. Heck I reckon one of the ATCOs here would let you sit in the tower and watch if you promised to keep quiet. At Perth we have NOTAMS every week to say various taxiways are blocked due parked aircraft. There is not even enough room to park the damn things. We are in a resource boom here so FIFO is going crazy.
4. Establish a proper education and training program via software courses and do this well before the implementation date.
Speak to RHS about this. This exactly the opposite of the last two NAS changes. They were unmitigated disasters, a how not to implement something example. Last minute amending documents that barely arrived by implementation date. Chart changes that were reversed at the next amendment as they were independently found to be dangerous.
5. Totally overhaul the pilot training sylabii in Australia: get rid of multiple choice exams where the answers are known well in advance and get rid of the designated examiners and put that all back in control of CASA. The pilots that are being sent over here from there are a disgrace and you all know it. Also, make all Australian CPL holders get an instrument rating as part of their qualification just like it is in most countries now.
OFF TOPIC ALERT. We are talking about AIRSPACE. Anyway, the US system you admire and operate in uses multi choice EVERYWHERE and due to FOI laws EVEN PUBLISHES the blasted things for everyone to rote learn!
6. Send working teams of controllers and regulators to Americas busiest airports and have them trained here, so you all actually know what you're talking about, rather than reading about it in the Newspaper or on the 'net.
Do you honestly believe ATCOs do not travel either privately or as part of their job to see what goes on overseas? Really? Come on Chris...
7. Establish a deadline for completion and stop leaving the entire airspace in "limbo" while you guys throw stuff back and forth at each other.
Agree entirely. The problem is that to have a deadline you need to know what the end state is. NAS documents actually state that there is no known end state at this stage, have you read them Chris? If NAS is so great, bring it on. It is the ARG and NASIG that have gone VERY QUIET of late.Now we are getting another level of bureacracy to manage airspace
Have a nice day.