Old News.
This first surfaced a few months ago on another intranet thread when someone in an office (never having worked operationaly) mooted that to save money, night-time operations for UK could be moved to one centre i.e. Swanwick would close at night. Now I don't mind the question being asked by a non-ops person - they can't be expected to understand how we work if the work they do for NATS does not have a direct impact opn what we do in the Ops room.
It's the muppets that do have a direct say on our work that then run with the idea thinking it's great that worry me.
Obviously for it to work the whole concept of ATC regulation and licensing would need to be bypassed or overhauled - and I'm sure that operators into LTMA airfields at night woud love to go to a procedural and therefore less efficient operation.
The fact that on the intranet someone from Oceanic has stated that procedural control is very modern nowadays misses the point totally. Procedural control has it place - but if we could have radar coverage over the ocean, we would use that instead of procedural - therein lies the whole point.
These schemes are dreamt up by people who have either never worked in an ops room, or have not set foot on watch for a long time.
Speaking purely from an LTMA point of view (but obviously it affects AC as well as the feeding and receiving unit), the amount of arrivals, especially until 3am (ish) is actually fairly significant.
Of course, no thought is made of the extra manning required up north to work the initial start of the transatlantic arrivals with the extra workload of London FIR traffic...
Also, not thought to the licensing requirements that state an early shift cannot commence before 0530 - therefore night shift manning will still be required. (SRATCOH rules - designed to ensure safe ATC provision - maybe some non operational people should do some research).
This is the same sort of claptrap that is thought up by non ops people or people who only have experience of their own operation.
There are rules in place now of what you can and can't do on a night shift to amuse yourself (more to the point, stay awake) in the wee dark hours - you know the 0300 to 0500 when the body is at its lowest ebb. For instance, you're allowed to read a book, but not allowed to watch a DVD on your laptop (even with volume very low and your RT on loud speaker).
The fact that a fast-paced film is possibly more likely to keep you alert than the soporific effect that reading has on most people is neither here nor there - some HF person has stated what they think we should do, based on no experience of working ATC shifts and without even shadowing for a couple of cycles to try to understand.
Bear in mind though that a tactic throughout the history of management/union relations in all types of employment has been for management to put some ridiculously stupid ideas on the table in order to slip in some other, fairly odious but less dodgy practice.
Then when the new rules or whatever are adopted, the sheep collectively sigh with relief and say 'yeah, it isn't great, but its better than what they really wanted', when in fact the management have achieved what they set out to do.
Smoke and mirrors - the biggest mistake anyone can make is to think that senior management are stupid - they are far from it.