But you would prefer a non-tested, very ambitious training system which aims to 'sweat the assets' to achieve the promised efficiencies despite some very obvious shortcomings in its planned flypro generation and 'taxi-rank' system of aircraft availability?
No - if what you say above comes to pass. Be careful about who you listen to at Shawbury, because there is a lot of conjecture and doom-mongering from people with very few facts about the future to base it on! I'm sure I remember an old saying about innocent until proven guilty, but maybe we got rid of that as an efficiency measure.
However, at the same time, it's inevitable, the same is happening elsewhere, and in some respects it's demonstrably better than what we have at the moment. I agree that more time in the air would be preferable in the ideal world, but the real world appears to have drifted some distance from the ideal...
The problem is that there is no obvious reason why MFTS is a good idea. Even to a humble nav, it seems odd that "privatisation is better" has been accepted as gospel despite the costs and chaos involved.
True, although I'm sure that many people said much the same 20 years ago when DHFS was starting. And yet it turned out pretty well after the inevitable, and significant, teething troubles.