Dad + No.1
Why bother lifting your 40 mile limit when there are about 40 perfectly qualified AREA RADAR controllers in the room? They are all rated to work as an autonomous unit. It is only due to "ring fencing" from a certain other largish Scottish unit that we have the ridiculous situation where aircraft leave "The Station", get transferred to that unit, who provide it with a RAS if they are lucky, for 50 miles or so and then they transfer it back to another part of our operation.
You know as well as I do that we could provide the aircraft with a direct route, under RAS instead of the FIS that they would routinely recieve from the aforementioned unit, for the whole flight, only we are not allowed to do it.
P.S. BWL et al, surely the fuel burn in an ATP at FL70 ain't that different to that at FL130.
