atco-matic: You forgot to mention that, even assuming we can quickly make the switch given the difficulties you outline, that will still be no good as we cannot reach the hand transmit switch because that is underneath the strip board which was not supposed to be there when the console was designed. We are told that to reposition the transmit switch away from the strip board is impossible/too difficult/too costly (take your pick which and I'm sure Take 3 will have something to say about it...).
That leaves only the foot transmit switch, and to get at that you have to shift the trainee out of the seat and sit down yourself without getting your cables tangled up while still maintaining the traffic picture and responding to calls. Meantime two aircraft are, as the press would have it, hurtling towards each other at 10 miles a minute with you unable to take effective preventative action.
However you dress it up as being inevitable because you can only test things properly in operational use rather than 'in the cool and calm of a workshop' I think most would agree that it is an unsatisfactory, not to say potentially dangerous, way of going about things.
Take3: I understand where you are coming from, and I must say I admire your unwavering loyalty to the NERC system, but the things which are happening are just those things we were worried about. Long before NERC opened many members of the NTT and others raised serious worries and were told that there was no cause for concern as the testing was exhaustive and all possibilities had been anticipated. This is patently not the case, as recent events have shown. Even where faults were found, they were not fixed, with the result that a known problem with splitting from a workstation caused 178,000 minutes of delay when it happened again a few weeks back!!
