Airspace modernisation - consultation on a UK Airspace Design Service

It might but only in combination with a significant reworking of CAP 1616 which remains unfit for purpose in our view; there is also a very clear need to effectively address other unintended, but very likely, consequences of the proposal - these will be expanded upon in later questions but are primarily around the need to avoid the newly created UKADS monopoly taking the existing APDO's resources (specifically IFP designers) and thereby leaving them unable to meet their existing contractual obligations to airport clients and airport clients. IFP review and safeguarding activity is described as a safety critical function and creating a situation where many airports would be unable to obtain adequate IFP safeguarding and review work for their regular ongoing day-to-day requirements could result in a considerably less safe environment. Leaving the resourcing of the UKADS to 'market forces' would result in very poor service being experienced by many airports and potentially unsafe situations to develop. UKADS 1 cannot be permitted to 'rob Peter to pay Paul' in IFP Design resource terms - the IFP Designer shortage, industry wide needs to be sorted before the UKADS 1 is created or the results for the Airport industry will be chaotic.

Something has to change because the existing structure is not functioning as the primary beneficiaries of airspace modernisation need to be the ones that pick up the cost - in general terms this is not the smaller regional airports; the costs need to sit with the airspace users and/or the congested parts of the system that get the bulk of the benefits from airspace modernisation.
Where we would disagree is the creation of one single state-sponsored monopoly undertaking all IFP design, airspace design and, (by default) presumably all IFP safeguarding and 5-year review work.
This is going back to a situation where the Regulator effectively marks their own homework. Whilst much is made of the degrees of separation between the CAA and NATS, few in industry actually believes this separation to be effective and you only need to look at the proposed structure of the UKADS and in particular the proposed governance to see it will be the recreation and extension of another NATS monopoly.
It might be reasonable for a UKADS to have overall oversight and responsibility but not to be the organisation doing all of the delivery - otherwise you remove all competition and the whole industry ultimately has to bear higher costs. Monopolies combined with weak regulation never result in good outcomes for the consumer.

Broadly agree with the definition but refer to previous answers to questions 1 and 2

Broadly agree but subject to the points raised in our answers to other questions.

Agree with the focus on London first (assuming the affected airports are in favour) but not sure agree with a single state-sponsored monopoly being created and given the ability to exert so much influence over what has been a market with at least some competition; the impact and effects of such a large monopoly player in the ANSP market is fairly clear to see and inevitably the greatest impacts are pushed down to the smaller airports - those least able to cope with them.
How the work is delivered and distributed is key and the structure must be such that existing APDOs can still function and can still deliver their contractual obligations to their client airports - this will not be the case if resourcing of the UKADS 1 is left merely to 'market forces'; The management of any transition and the structure of how the work to be under the remit of the UKADS 1 is to be delivered is the most important issue at play here if you are to avoid a situation where all APDO resource is sucked out of the wider system and into servicing the needs of the London Airspace modernisation project.

There is an absence of detail on the scope and remit of UKADS - will it also absorb IPF safeguarding and 5-year review work and what about ACPs for the smaller GA and business aviation airports?
The biggest problem with the model (as referenced in almost all our answers) is that unless there is clear structure and control to how the UKADS 1 is resourced it will merely absorb all the UK IFP designers (of which there are not very many) and the existing APDOs will be left unable to meet contractual obligations or meet the needs of client airports - safeguarding of IFPs is a safety critical function that must still be resourced but cannot be if a designer gives 3 months notice and it takes 3 years + to recruit and replace one. How the wider industry recruits and retains designers needs to be looked at as an essential part of the consultation and planning or you will simply move the problem form one part of the industry to another and it will be the non-London regional airports that will suffer the most.

The real problem here is that there are not enough designers in the industry for a host of historical reasons but this includes (a) it takes too long and is too costly to train them in the UK with the (still) gold-plating of standards by UK CAA (3 years on the job training for an ab-initio designer - we train pilots and air traffic controllers in half the time), (b) design staff are recruited into the CAA (c) the time to accept an already qualified designer from another overseas (ICAO PANS-OPS) country is too long (and potentially the only viable solution in the short-medium term).
If no control measures are applied to how UKADS 1 is resourced as a monopoly provider then a likely scenario is could recruit all the designers from the UK APDOs (they are only around 20 in total) and they will be left unable to deliver IFP safeguarding, 5-year reviews which (as we are reminded regularly by CAA) are safety critical functions - these will be not be able to be delivered if APDs are all recruited to a single organisation primarily focused on the delivery of the London airspace modernisation.

Would prefer to see a degree of independent coordination and oversight continue - this already feels too much like the creation of a state-sponsored monopoly.

Yes agree but they must be able to have access to the same funding pot and this becomes an entirely rhetorical question if the creation of the UKADS1 with NATS is permitted to occur by taking all of the very limited resource from the existing UK APDOs.......no others will be able to progress...!

Not sure the remit should include all of the design work - this should be equitably distributed amongst the APDOs as subcontractors so as not to put all eggs in one basket with a monopoly provider. Would be better if IFP Safeguarding and review work was excluded and all surfaces necessary for safeguarding activities created by UKADS 1 should be made freely available for other APDOs to use for such work.

Agree that the user should pay and a central funding pot should be created but it must be available to all airports to use from day 1 - not just those subject to UKADS1. If not, then outside of UKADS1 it is probable that most sponsors would stop any ACP work and wait for the future point when funding becomes available. This is clearly detrimental to the wider UK airspace modernisation ambitions. Discrepancy in the timing of access to ACP funding would, in effect, create a further unfair advantage to those airports that are able to access the funds vs those that cannot. It must be made available to all sponsors at the same time.

Para 5.33 in particular (which refers to the "Displacement of specialist airspace design consultancies" doesn't offer any credible mitigation and misses the fundamental point that the 'displaced' resource is the same resource that does much of the UK's IFP safeguarding and IFP review work (outside of London) and this resource is currently very busy across all the APDOs - if the UKADS 1 takes some or all of them, how will this existing ongoing and safety critical contractual workstream be delivered - THIS NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED as it is one of the largest 'elephants in the room'. (The other being what is the mechanism proposed for compensating the "displaced specialist airspace design consultancies" given the time and resource invested to date in building their businesses, and likely claims they may get for compensation from their clients whose contractual requirements they can no longer meet). These issues need addressing head-on if the proposal is to avoid likely calls for a JR.
If the intention is to leave this issue to "market forces" then it it envisaged that there will be major disruption to existing workstreams for many UK airports and this surely cannot be what would be envisaged by CAA and DfT? One only has to look at the current state of disarray in the supply of Air Traffic Controllers to see that leaving to 'market forces' (where there is a large incumbent monopoly supplier present) does not work and can be hugely disruptive.
As a bare minimum, 'a safe and orderly transition' clause (similar to ANSP transition) should be applied to the APDO / IFP Designer environment whereby the monopolist has to allow the smaller party time to recruit, train and backfill a designer before they are released and agree to support pre-existing commercial contractual arrangements through to their natural conclusion.

Broadly agree but not immediately apparent how competing airport requirements will be resolved. Also need to consider all of the interfaces with bordering ACPs and what happens if ACPs on the interface of the cluster are operating to a very different timeline.

Agree broadly but refer to answer 12 - the biggest issue is the impact of the removal of existing APDO staff to the UKADO 1 organisation leaving those organisations unable to fulfil their contractual obligations, specifically IFP safeguarding and reviews to a range of client airports.

The level of pre-consultation is too much; the need to consider every conceivable option wastes time and achieves nothing. The whole 1616 process is too time consuming and too expansive in scope if the airspace modernisation strategy is to be delivered in anything like the desired timeframe. This was an anticipated outcome at the launch of the 1616 process and should not be a surprise. The ACP process appears to have gone from one extreme (where it was deemed not to be sufficiently transparent) to one where transparency and accountability is valued over all other aspects - admirable in intent but the result is what we have now and it won't, in the current form, deliver the essential airspace modernisation.

We would like to see the MDs/Senior representatives of each of the other APDOs in the UK also taking a seat on the Governance Board to ensure impartiality. As proposed it feels very much like a state-sponsored monopoly marking its own homework.

The Board if not broad enough - the only domain expertise sits with NATS/NERL, CAA and DfT - needs much more independent scrutiny.

How do you ensure NERL / UKADS1 are offering good value and not merely pricing as a monopoly provider (given the governance structure lacks credible independence from what has been described)?
Accepting that you could find a way to address the above point, the creation of a UK ADSF is very positive and at last puts the costs where they should be with the beneficiaries.
However, it must be made available to all airports, (not just those covered by ADS1), otherwise existing ACP work will likely be paused awaiting the outcome of the wider expansion of the UKADS.

All elements - you don't get the airspace modernisation delivered unless the whole ACP is delivered? Airports should be able to recover internal resource dedicated / allocated to an ACP, (at least at cost), for example for recovery of the local stakeholder engagement activity and creation/delivery of communication plans.

The structure of UKADS 2 needs to clearly articulate how the future IFP workstreams would be spread across all of the UK APDOs with UKADS 2 acting as a co-ordinating body. If the intent is to create another NATS monopoly it is reasonable to expect that some (or all) of the UK APDOs will consider a JR route given the proposal could very adversely affect their business. It would be preferable to see a mechanism to equitably distribute the work. If this is not the model taken forward then there must be a compensation mechanism for APDOs and some form of transition plan to ensure client airports (mostly outside London) are not left without APDO services such as IFP safeguarding and review - the market in the UK is too small to simply allow 'market forces to prevail' and the absence of access to IFP services has the potential to become a serious safety issue.

The RIA appears somewhat inadequate and has not in any way considered the central theme running through our answers, namely that if the UKADS1 organisation takes resource from the other existing APDOs, then these organisations will not have the capacity to meet there existing contractual obligations to deliver design work, safeguarding and reviews of IFPs for airports across the UK - the inability to complete IFP assessments could slow down major developments if airports are unable to approve them from an IFP impact perspective and, as is likely, a scenario is permitted to develop where IFP safeguarding doesn't happen effectively, there would be significant safety impacts. Look at the current, well publicised situation in South Africa where IFP reviews have not been done and very significant numbers of procedures have been withdrawn from service.
It is absolutely essential that how the UKADS1 will be resourced is tackled up front and it must be in a way that does not adversely impact the delivery of IFP services by the non-NATS APDO's. In the very short term the CAA should look very closely at how IFP Designers are approved - why such a long on the job training period for new ab-initio designers (3 years in the UK)? One sensible solution is to encourage PANS-OPs compliant designers from outside UK to relocate but the approval process needs to be fast-tracked and one major concession that would make a material difference would be to allow an experienced PANS-OPs trained designer from outside the UK to immediately undertake safeguarding work in the UK - everything still has to be checked by a second UK approved designer but why checked twice? If the double, double checking can't be relaxed for IFP Design work ,surely for safeguarding work would be a sensible concession to allow more resource to be brought on stream in the UK quickly and part mitigate some of the resource problems described across our answers to the consultation ..?