Recent content by radar

Yes, he used to be the head of ATC at DSA 1.0, so it makes sense. Nice chap.

That was charitable of him.

Standby for spittle-flecked, swivel-eyed logical contortions to somehow pin this on LBA. Or possibly Tony Blair.

Wait a minute, so airspace change is long, difficult and expensive, there are no short-cuts with the CAA and no guarantees? What huge surprise.

£90k for a SATCO (Senior Air traffic Control Officer) isn’t ‘high’ really, it’s about what they should be offering for the radar-qualified controllers that the SATCO will be managing. Also the ‘inclusive of market supplement’ bit suggests that it’s not all pensionable, which is pretty poor. As...

They don’t seem to have recruited a Head of Air Traffic Services, yet they are trying to recruit controllers! That is what a HoATS should be doing for them - building the team that they are going to lead. It’s a challenging business to get the balanced composition of qualifications and...

As I predicted when the advert came out, they obviously got nowhere near the response they needed and it’s because of the poor T&Cs and the risk of the venture failing. The salary has now increased by £20k. As a controller who resides in the North of England and who is, presumably, part of...

‘Heathrow of the North’ has a familiar ring to it. How did that work out last time?

Possibly. This is a major, ongoing project to rework the airspace and arrival/departure routes around Manchester, Liverpool and LBA. It’s all very well CDC saying that the old DSA airspace worked fine - that may be the case but the airspace it previously connected to is changing and this might...

Don’t forget the microlight, paragliding and paramotor people, as well as the rest of the alphabet soup of GA pilots’ bodies. Many of them see ACPs as a blood sport, and take great satisfaction in shooting them down.

Because the subsidy announcement is the next inflection point, and it’s apparent in the nervous language from CDC and SYCMA about it that the prospect of a successful challenge represents a significant risk to the whole project.

This whole argument is completely disingenuous. No-one’s been saying that airports can’t be publicly owned, just that they can’t use public money to distort the market through subsidies.

Yes, it does appear that (finally!!!) someone has sat her down and explained the actual timelines for licensing an airport, and airspace change process.

The CAA have to be scrupulously fair in how they apply the process. Rush it and fudge the criteria for one airport (for… reasons?), and other airports that have had to jump through all the hoops legitimately are going to kick off. Which will be nothing compared to the howls of rage from airspace...