Eyeinthesky,
I bit my lip the first time I read your comment on the other thread and thought I'd let it go, but since you've repeated it I feel duty bound to reply:
Having seen the new NSea airspace plan, my colleagues and I actually believe that we are getting less
useful airspace out of the whole deal. While we will happily work a sortie in 30x60nm at the moment, Typhoon will, on present predictions, take ~150x60nm to acheive its training goals. If the upper air routes and military zones (whether DAs or some other fudged name) are firmed up we will be completing less sorties each day which impacts on our training - training for flying over such benign environments as Iraq and Afganistan!
My experience is that there has been little or no restriction on the number of civil airliners working the NSea - in fact it appears to be increasing. (Fully admit I don't have figures to back this up, only what I've seen on the scope over the last few years and will quite happily be corrected.) However, bottom line for the military is that a higher proportion of training sorties are being "thrown away" because we can't complete training objectives in the busier airspace. This worries me and should worry you as well.
Reading between the lines in your post it would appear that you place little importance on this military training.
Quote "If you object, then you will be told that unless they have this space then Air Defence is compromised. Wins every time! " Unquote.
As a humble servant of you, the taxpayer, may I suggest you check your attitude - if it wasn't for years of air defence, which you treat with apparent disdain, you'd be writing your post in German or, God forbid, Russian. We all have a job to do - best we get some workable solution rather than sniping at each other.
Scott V,
Yeah, I've controlled AD in USA and love the system. You're lucky though, having a greater volume of airspace to start with. If we closed down the airpsace that we'd like to have for some of our military exercises, Swanwick would grind to a halt for a few hours. Mmmm, now if we could only fit those around the current failures we might have something!
AA