Slim
Common sense applies too! We'll happily scrap the booking system, but the approach interval we still always be 10 minutes! Aeroplanes can't fly simultaneous procedural approaches so somebody will end up going around the hold until it's their turn! Pilot's might moan about booking but they'll be more pi$$ed off about having to go round the stack for an extra 20 minutes!
The fact that we have radar doesn't always necessarily help. It's primary only and located on the airfield. This means that it can't 'see' the holding traffic because it's in the radar overhead and the pilots want to fly the full procedure anyway. We use the radar to fit the commercial traffic in around the procedural trainers.
85 000 flights (...and we're only open 12 hours a day) makes us about the 13th busiest public use licensed airfield in the UK each year.
Aviation as a whole, and particularly ATC, are obviously vastly different Stateside. I have no experience of it, but is it really THAT busy? Are the skys really black with aeroplanes?....Maybe the standards of airmanship are higher?
Fuji
I don't think that there's a 'political' issue here. Shoreham handles a similar volume of traffic as us extremely efficiently and effectively, I'm sure you'll agree....I've flown in a few times (I was number 6 downwind once) and it's like the war! I genuinely believe that there efforts to 'regulate' the instrument traffic is safety motivated.