I wonder how flexible civvies will be to Urgent operational requests for late or early opening?
Or are we forgetting that AKT sits as a major hub for the Middle east, you know, that place where a little bit of stuff is going on at the mo?
IIRC the existing AKT civvies - firemen I think? - were often the [financially] limiting factor for not opening out-of-hours, up until about 2 years ago when someone happened to notice the AT fleet on ops were being somewhat hamstrung by restricted hours and instead having to go to places like Souda. All of a sudden the restrictions were lifted and AKT became 'can do'.
What would be truly idiotic would be for the MoD to back itself into a corner by contracting out, only to then spend the saving on repeated OOH requests, which it'll inevitably need. It's one thing to make ASI and GIB a pain in the a$$ to get into, but quite another to create a bottleneck at AKT...