PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - UK SAR 2013 privatisation: the new thread
Old 24th May 2015, 16:07
  #1967 (permalink)  
[email protected]
 
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: EGDC
Posts: 10,332
Received 623 Likes on 271 Posts
The ARCCK has long struggled to find enough aviation qualified people to act as controllers and had to make do with lots of training to try and bring the others up to speed.

One problem will be money - whereas military controllers at Kinloss have been relatively well paid and often asked to work there for personal reasons, the CG pays peanuts and will struggle to attract people of the right quality and background, especially given property prices in the South of England.

In the same way that the MCA thinks local knowledge isn't relevant in this modern age of communications (they have recently been proved wrong at Milford after closing Swansea CG) - I have no doubt that a lack of quality aviation (especially SAR helicopter) knowledge and experience will waste time on SAR callouts and possibly cause loss of life as a result.

As ever with the MCA there is unlikely to be any transparency or oversight of how effective their operations are and FOI requests are far too clumsy a system to show what is actually happening on a day to day basis. At least as military operators we could always pick up the phone for a hot debrief after a job and run any concerns we had through our chain of command - when MCA is both the provider and the customer, how is that going to happen?
crab@SAAvn.co.uk is offline