Capcom, that crawling, cowtowing article by now departed RAAA CEO Terry Wesley- Smith was clearly written with one aim in mind - and it worked.
That is keep the Bureaucrats on side so that the multimillion subsidy for en -route charges remained and so that they would also not bring in the world accepted requirement for 10 - 30 pax RAAA Airline aircraft to be fitted with TCAS . That also worked.
Also it was clear that Wesley-Smith's mind was set in concrete- as many ex-military minds are.
I spoke to Wesley- Smith a number of times. It was clear that he was totally ignorant as to how Airspace in other leading aviation countries worked. In fact it was clear he had no interest in this.
He was fundamentalist when it came to Airspace reform. He is sure to be one of the posters on this thread desperately attempting to stop any change.
The AERU which he heaps so much praise on did no airspace reform at all- and that's why he thought it was so fantastic!
Spodman, I wiil repeat for possibly the tenth time, Class C is only "safer" if it properly staffed and proper equipment is provided.
In the AsA case an existing Class D controller, mostly one person who could already be overloaded with aerodrome traffic is also given the responsibilty for vast amounts of en-route C Airspace to 8500'.
This clearly must reduce the overall safety of the combined Airspace.
It appears to be only a very small number of really dumb controllers who keep insisting to AsA management that Dick Smith is wrong and that here in Australia one Class D controller can also handle vast amounts of Class C.
Just why these Controllers do this is beyond comprehension when you consider that in no other country are non radar tower controllers given such workload and responsibility.
Also as stated before it makes it clear to AsA management that some controllers are not very bright and can be exploited.
Fortunately there are new controllers coming along with lateral thinking ability and comonsense.
Last edited by Dick Smith; 31st Jan 2009 at 03:12.