Ferris,
Maybe I didn't express it as clearly as I should have, but the claimed savings in capital expenditure, for not replacing (some of) the remote radar heads was based on a cost of about 10 times the NZ cost per head, don't you think that might just possibly make the quantum of claimed savings just a little suss.
As Dick Smith has also pointed out, the ADS-B RIS is now a complete and utter nonsense -- see a few pages back.
As I recall, the old SSR heads, here and NZ, were Cossor (Thomson) but somebody will correct me if otherwise, the point is that NZ have had the same replacement, because AU and NZ had the same gear.
"--- the Government was going to pay"?? ??? Mmmaaate!!, where have you been since about 1984?? Remember Hawke's mate Henry Bosch --- of user pays fame.
The ASTRA/JCP magic mantra was: "cross industry subsidy" ----- the airlines, in reality, Qantas and Virgin, were supposedly going to part with somewhere between $100-200M ---- and pigs might fly.
I have actually heard the former QF Director of Finance on the subject, at an informal meeting of AIPA members at a well known Macquarie St watering hole, I can assure you that his view was exactly the same as Dickson, but perhaps expressed in somewhat less colourful terms ---- and this was when the airlines were booming.
Folks, nobody killed any subsidy, it died of natural causes, a spontaneous abortion. The subsidy is, and was always a dead parrot, not just resting.
Tootle pip!!
PS: Still no information on the wonderful Australian ADS-B gear that is available, so we are told, and all within the mythical subsidy levels. Funny thing, that, such wonderful claims, but so little documented fact. The story of the JCP, really.