There are good and bad Handling agents, there are good and bad CLC’s there are good and bad agents in both environments.
Fact, there are no turn round coordinators in the US and the aircraft leave on time and dont crash because of misloads.
Fact, if everyone did their job on time there would be no need for a TRC
Fact, the quality of Dispatch staff in the UK has fallen in the last 20 years OVERALL, again there are good and bad staff.
In my view more and more full service airlines will start to move to CLC especially if they are using a vertically integrated package like the Amadeus system for all their flights. There are clear benefits in cost and experience*. There will be a number of airlines who will not do so, especially the charter airlines who don’t need the functionality and therefore cost of these new generation systems.
It remains to be seen if the handlers will all chose to move to CLC or not, I know Servisair have but I don’t know about the others. In my view if there is a cost saving then they will move to the CLC concept if not then they wont.
*At the risk of being flamed using the following scenario that saw in a presentation recently
An airline flying to 50 destinations three times a day using the airlines system which requires 5 days system training
Costs benefits
In a decentralised environment that is
• 200 staff to be trained and a total of 1000 training days
• 200 flights to a training location
• 1000 nights in a Hotel.
In a centralised environment
• 10 staff to be trained
• Training at the CLC so only the trainer needs Hotac and Travel
experience
total savings 95%
In a decentralised environment assuming a 4 and 2 roster the load controller will complete about 250 loadsheets for this airline. In a centralised environment the 10 load controllers will clock up about 5,000 load sheets per year. This is 19 years of experience more than the decentralised load controller every year. The centralised load controllers performance can be monitored a lot closer in the single location that the 200 staff at 50 different airports and to quote a famous CEO, what gets measured gets managed.