soaringhigh650 wrote: “The whole purpose of controlled airspace is to improve aviation safety by reducing the risk of midair collisions in areas of higher density air traffic operations. It is not there to squeeze this traffic into tighter corridors.”
Not exactly, SH.
At the first CACAAC meeting I ever went to, in about 1975 (CACAAC was the predecessor of the UK NATMAC), a CAA chap made a statement engraved in my memory: "The prime remit of the Civil Aviation Authority is the protection of the fare-paying passenger."
That has been the biggest single influence, almost the only one, on the granting of new controlled airspace in the UK in all the time I have been involved with it. The secondary effects of crushing non-fare-paying-passenger traffic into chokepoints has rarely, if ever, been a consideration for the authorities.
Before my time, a British Gliding Association delegate was faced with a similar declaration. The authorities at that time said that safety outside controlled airspace was not their responsibility. He asked the question: "Then whose is it?"
Apparently this resulted in a prolongued pause, and no satisfactory answer , then or ever since.
In a more recent year, in a meeting at Duxford when proposals for transponder mandatory zones for Stansted were being discussed, I pointed out that the official documents proposing this were mistaken in saying there would be no adverse safety effects. I said it was inevitable that some non-transponder aircraft would be forced out of class G airspace where they spread out at the moment, and would end up in the chokepoint going round the corner of the new TMZs. But again, the authorities had no answer to this.
I have no statistics for movements through little used CTA/CTR/TMA areas - it is in their nature that these are not available in the public domain, as far as I know. If anybody else is able to point to them, I should be grateful for references, for future purposes.
Chris N