eglnyt:
Furthermore, I bet all the staff at CTC etc who support NSL must be comforted by that statement... do you think if we sold off NSL we would keep anywhere near as many support jobs? Two points to make. First you'll find very few jobs in CTC supporting NSL. For some time they've been going their own way. There is a lot of work done in CTC which is sold through NSL because that's how NATS has been bidding for external work. That work will go on as long as the expertise in CTC is valued
How long do
you think external customers will value a service that is related to something we don't do front line?
Sell NSL, lose a huge area of expertise. NATS is so good at what it does (coal face ATC in case anyone has forgotten what NATS is about), because it does it for real at some of the busiets airports and in some of the most congested/complex airspace in the world.
Stop doing the job at the coalface, and the 'expertise' soon withers in the backrooms.
Putting it bluntly - if we are not doing it for ourselves, we can't maintain our expertise in it; ergo the CTC jobs will wither and die, not immediately, but progressively after any sale of NSL.