Originally Posted by
fireflybob
It all boils down to money. Some of us are old enough to recall 30 odd years ago or more where the UK had military master diversion airfields which were open H24, fully manned and equipped with surveillance and talk down radar and also the ability to lay a foam carpet within 30 minutes if you needed to do a wheels up landing.
Now because of a paucity of such stations which are open H24 (peacetime Air Force now where the enemy doesn't attack at the weekends, bank holidays or outside office hours) there are times when vast swathes of the FIR is devoid of any radar service.
I'm sure the relevant authorities would say H24 radar service would be available if we paid for it but how much would they want to charge airspace users?
So, work this one out. Leuchars is now the only H24 military LARS unit in the country. It has no based military aircraft (apart from a UAS) and the only reason it is retained as a LARS unit is because Leuchars is a designated diversion for QRA Typhoons. But neither Lossiemouth nor Coningsby (where the Typhoons come from) is H24, and Typhoons can also use Newcastle and Edinburgh (both H24 and only minutes Typhoon time away from Leuchars) for diversions. So yes, we pay for it, and there are ATCOs sitting there all night every night for sod all.