A similar theme is repeated
here. I'm not really surprised either. What is surprising is that our current method of looking at ATC has not really changed that much over the past few years. Unfortunately the solution depends on a fresh thinking and a great dollop of imagination and this had shown to be lacking in the upper levels of NATS.
There are some immediate gains, but admittedly small ones, that can be made now. From the top of my head we could be given less micro-management of headings. A fair degree of headings just mimic our planned track which we would follow without intervention. Another is the constant statement of our passing of our passing level and readback of cleared level on handover. In a Mode S world these things are known or at least should be.
As for the future how about airways? I say ditch every one of them. What purpose do they serve? And SIDs and STARs. Do we really need them? And providing there is little extra noise, let's keep the public out of this. So once we have traffic going in-interrupted from A to B let it go, only interfere if it is going to bump into something. And even then, only get one to change. Then to back-up decision making, flow prediction software should then be able to predict times for arrivals and departures at boundaries. The difficult and complex job of controllers will still be weaving the arrivals and departures into the "flow", but at least they will have less to listen to and less to say.
Hopefully such things are being worked on now. I'll know some big thinking is happening when "big thinking" decends to trivia such as ATIS information. Do I really need to know "there is increased bird activity at the airfield" at 10:30pm (and increased by how much; 7% or 43%? Or threshold elevation. What on earth do I do with that number?).
The above is not me having a pop at ATC. I find UK ATC a helpful and pragmatic bunch but always feel they are constrained by some pretty limiting rules. Not until these change will improvements be possible.
PM