Andrewr.
Your postulations are nothing more than speculation. You
may speculate that pilots wont cut corners, but I put it to you that they might just be aware of what can and cant be seen, and that knowledge might actually worsen the situation. Either way, changing an airspace system based on
speculation about what
might or might not be achieved is pretty stupid.
Whilst in the Benalla accident, the a/c might have been on radar and off course, there is always going to come a time in every single approach when the aircraft will be maneuvering in a manner not apparent to the controller (unless the idea is to mandate ILS-type approaches using WAAS/whatever, and a/c must be 'stable' before being cleared to approach, or some such rubbish
). Every a/c must descend below the lowest safe at some point. Dick's idea to have increased hand-holding will bring enormous delay to many, many IFR flights that are successfully completed every year. This extra cost to the industry has nebulous benefit- what if the controller does have surveillance coverage, does have the aircraft on freq, and is monitoring the approach on a scale sufficient to detect the a/c being off-track? What if the pilot at Benalla acknowledges, checks his GPS derived position and comes up with the same wrong answer/incorrect info/whatever and continues with the same result? PURE SPECULATION, either way. Hardly a basis for airspace management. The only certainty is that there will be extra delays to IFR a/c (as an example; I'm assuming in the Orange incident cited that one of the a/c would've been holding overhead, waiting for the other to report on the ground so that the controller could clear the holding a/c to approach
) Just imagine the wasted time/resources etc.!!!
If proponents could absolutely show that ausNAS would provide affordable increases in safety, then there wouldn't be much of a leg for any naysayers to stand on. The problem is that many can see the practicalities (and their challenges) of what is proposed, and how little it will help anything.