Howabout
Why should we accept E, when positive, guaranteed, separation can be provided with C? It's just not logical.
Why not A? Why not B? We could cover the entire continent with class B because it is 'safer' than E. Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? We simply don't do this because it costs too much.
Better still. Lets make it illegal for any aircraft to take off. This is the only way of
guaranteeing no aircraft will ever collide with other traffic or the terrain.
Apparently
Owen Stanley thinks this is the best idea because it's clearly the
safest by far.
Some controllers here have been arguing that the US cannot provide class C in the enroute environment because the level of VFR traffic is far too great. The system would grind to a halt. Of course they are right, it would grind to a halt and it would cost billions more to staff the extra ATC sectors to cope with the extra responsibilities were they to use enroute Class C.
You controllers have two irreconcilable positions on Class E. That is, we should use enroute Class C,
because we can but only until traffic levels reach that of the United States, then we should downgrade it to Class E so we don't run into grid lock. Extraordinary!
I simply cannot accept Civil Air's position that Class C costs no more to staff and run than Class E. This is the most preposterous claim imaginable.
Surely you can see that if we put 10 VFR flights a day into the airspace surrounding an airport we might be able to do it for the same cost. But when we put 100 or 1000 into the same space the work load and cost will inevitably increase.
If Civil Air were right then the FAA could divide up their enroute Class E into tiny sectors, reclassify it Class C and
employ thousands more controllers at no extra cost to handle the 5000-7000 VFR aircraft pottering around US skies each day. Wow! Which voodoo mathematician worked that one out?
The biggest issue I have with enroute Class C over D
Howabout is that if the risk of collision at Broome is such that Class D is justified, how can a higher classification of risk mitigation (Class C) be justified in the areas further away from the airport where the risk of collision actually drops significantly?
I could vaguely understand using Class C at the airport, class D in the 'link' airspace and class E at say 20nm or 30nm. At least that model follows some kind of logic.