Originally Posted by DelPrado
Slip and Turn, you have proven time and again on ATC threads that you don't know what you're talking about.
Well you might forgive me if I say I have reason to summarise slightly differently
I recall in the past you trying to argue separation standards with a Heathrow tower controller.
Could be true - does that mean that a mere mortal managed to engage with the next best thing to a God? Wow. I remember arguing that the vertical separation between departing London City traffic and descending Heathrow inbound crossing traffic in the area of Canary Wharf should be increased to allow much greater margin for a proven pilot error (level bust) hotspot. Simple as that, but of course it was already perfectly well reasoned, like everything else at NATS. I believe the levels were adjusted eventually (3000' minimum increased to 4000' for LHR inbounds joining westerly final from the north descending and crossing abeam western end of City?), but I have to say I haven't checked closely, so you might have a point.
Originally Posted by Gonzo
s&t,
Any shortfall in the pension, and there has been such over the past few years, has been met by increased employer contributions and changes in staff T&Cs.
So NATS being the employer, shouldered the shortfalls? And NATS is 49% publically owned? A bit like Lloyds Banking Group and RBS? Or nothing like Lloyds Bank and RBS ? But suffice to say that money used for plugging multi-million pound holes in gilt-edged pension commitments first made when NATS was part of the Civil Service, means a shortage in available funds for ongoing capital investment in operations, does it not? Can we agree on that? And the size of those pension fund shortfalls each year was? The accounts and reports for NATS and its various guises defies clarity of any sort at first glance, which one can only assume is deliberate. Can you decode for us and summarise, or do I have to Google more obscure documents like
this one? And maybe DelPrado's 2012 re-sounding of a substantial 8 figure warning bell first rung 13 years ago in this thread:
http://www.pprune.org/atc-issues/501...-reminder.html which never got heeded?
Not exactly the best transparency for a publicly owned entity, is it? Bits here and there and no-one really volunteering the big picture ... ?
A paragraph written 4½ years ago in that Government Actuary's Dept. document said this:
Originally Posted by (elsewhere) in a GAD document for CAA
The NATS scheme’s benefits are more generous than those provided by typical UK private sector DB schemes. Approximate calculations suggest that, if the NATS scheme’s benefits were to be more typical, the employer’s standard contribution rate could be around 25% of pay, compared to the actual rate of 37% of pay. The purpose of this calculation is solely to illustrate the broad effect of the level of the NATS scheme’s benefits on NERL’s projected contributions. We have not been asked to comment on the reasonableness of the level of the scheme’s benefits. We recognise that the NATS scheme’s benefits reflect the scheme’s public sector origins and protections put in place at privatisation.
The executive summary in that report also has a chart indicating that NATS En Route Plc's (NERL’s) projected pension contributions – £ million in constant 2008-09 prices terms (whatever that last caveat really means) were as high as £90M. We are 4½ years further on. How did they turn out, please? Or is the expenditure on pensions insignificant compared to capital expenditure on operations, and therefore a red herring in this thread?
And is the NERL pension expenditure the lion's share of NATS overall pension commitments or is there more buried elsewhere in the various books?