SM4 Pirate
Sounds like you've been having a red wine moment. My position is, when they REALLY do something to resolve the situation that they have put us and them into, I will be willing to forego my days off to help alleviate the problem.
At the moment they aren't even trying, they have embarked on another restructure and trying to develop a model that they have bugger all idea how to implement. They are big on words like vision, worlds best, delivering the future yet have no idea and no plan to get there. Greg Russell came in and as you would expect was overwhelmed by people who were immediately trying to impress him, unfortunately for the Aviation industry, us and him, he picked the wrong horses.
The first thing they should have done when PC had his epiphany (Service Delivery Environment,SDE) is sit down and work out a long term plan to work out what staffing and resources were required to get there. I was involved when the vision was first being dripfed from the top,we were saying then that we don't have the bowwave numbers to get there, we could get a third of the way there but we don't have the numbers to work the consoles now, let alone release people to retrain.
At the same time ASA saw fit to create another level of management, the ATS Line Managers (ALMs), they chose to offer grossly inflated salary packages to entice people onto AWAs. They lost another 100+ controllers off the rosters, and didn't get the best people because alot were worried about being in a safety critical environment and the conflict of interest of between paypacket tenure against unbiased decision making.
SM4, why would ASA or the government close it down?
I am genuinely hoping that the Aviation Bureaucrats will pull their heads out of their arse and get back to our core responsibility of staffing and delivering a first world ATC system. They can still bring in their SDE model, it has some good points that will be good for the airlines, but they have to deliver it with the resources that THEY have left themselves with.Fail to plan, plan to fail.
I am hoping that the Egos at the top wake up to themselves, put the ALMs who can actually separate aircraft back on the roster, give the ones who can't 'opportunities to pursue other interests', offer a realistic training wage to ATC aspirants, resource the College properly, have a clean out of those overpaid newbies at upper level whose only skills seem to be whizzbang powerpoint presentations and weasel words and get back to delivering to the airlines and public the service that they are PAYING for.
In the words of JH (the new GM ATC),we have been over promising and under delivering to our customers. Give the airlines free flight and RNP like we've been promising for years, we can do it relatively quickly but it hasn't been a priority. It should be.
SM4, what you are saying is way,way down the track, personally, if it gets to that stage I won't be here anyway.