2 scary thoughts....?

[s'lick]

1 - if TAG bought us for £800M. Well, alleged £50M cash plus an inherited £750 debt - and want us to save on operating costs by £50M next year (and thus every year thereafter NATS will be 50M cheaper to run ?) then, allowing for rough interest and NO increase in turnover i.e. traffic, does that mean they can recover their investment completely over the next 20 years without spending another penny ?

2 - pre PPP, it was mooted that we can expect to handle double the current number of flights by 2015. Why then, that the TAG "Manpower Plan" shows a reduction in staff from a rough 5800 now to approx. 3900 by 2011 ?
The %'s quoted show that 34% of staff now (approx 1970) are ATCO's and in 2011 will be 63% of 3900 (about 2457).

Does this then mean that a 24% increase in the number of ATCOs associated with an overall DECREASE of staff by 1900 will be able to handle nearly twice the current no. of flights ?

I may have got these wrong but if not, that sounds scary to me......

anybody any thoughts ?


-----------------------------

"if I wanted to count coppers, I would have joined the Police"
:)

[HarryBucket]

When TAG talk about saving money the main saving I believe will be in support staff, eg. personnel and various managers which seem to multiply in any Civil Service organisation. TAG have also said that they will buy "off the shelf" systems instead of doing their own R&D. This will see the elimination of R&D costs as well as the loss of the R&D staff. TAG have made a commitment for NATS to be an Air Traffic Control provider and nothing more. This is why over half of the staff will be operational controllers in the future and not admin.

Lets have a bit of faith in the plans TAG have outlined as they do have alot of experience running private aviation companies and British Airways went through the same public to private process within the last twenty years and they seem to be doing okay.

[It's a Joke]

Harry.......what a positive outlook, and let's ALL hope you're right !

[Rad1]

Whilst I wouldn't blame TAG for doing away with R & D and other activities that are not directly relevant to day-to-day service provision, it does worry me where the expertise will go (or will it just be lost).

Who will do the R & D and the international representation (all those jollies to ICAO meetings) that NATS have done in the past? Or is it all just a waste of time, effort and money? (It's a genuine question, honest!)

[s'lick]

don't know how we're gonna be a world leader in ATC if we're just going to buy off the shelf from now on and not innovate (?) via the ATMDC like we do now

[RATBOY]

Are there off the shelf ATC systems that you can buy like so many VCRs and plug in and run? I think not. The easy part is getting hardware to light up. The hard part is getting it to work together and with the procedures and humans and that takes development and integration which takes labor which costs money. period. end of story.