French airspace changes from ATC union papers

Well, it seems that they had a look in Germany and at how efficient ATS services for a big country work.

In Germany, having an approach controller sitting in almost each and every control tower (or at least someone doing approach control, even if he also does TWR at the same time) is something that was abandoned about 30 or 40 years ago. Sooner or later, the UK will realize this as well…

For VFR, the day this comes will be a sad day, as the service from the various SIVs is always excellent, and getting clearances into the respective TMA is super-easy and immediate.

For IFR, I can’t see too many downsides.

Also, for the typical VFR or IFR GA pilot, having only AFIS instead of TWR does not really have many downsides (except possibly less IFR capacity). To the contrary, if the various CTRs go away, it is better for VFR pilots because it means they can no longer be trapped when class D VMC conditions are not met.

It’s a strange one and the DGAC have given no explanation to cancelling the remote tower project. But Tours still has a tower and 4 ATCOs so it would seem that the DGAC are for some reason not kean on copying Germany and Scandinavia.
It shouldn’t make much difference having AFISOs instead of ATCOs in places like La Rochelle as long as for IFR the QNH is still available. The other question will be if the TMAs will disappear and whether Class D airspace will be downgraded to Class E airspace. If there’s no one to give clearances what is the point of having anything above Class E or TMAs?

La Rochelle has serious amounts of CAT. No way the TWR will disappear there.

I guess they are thinking more about deserted places like Albert Bray, Merville, Deauville, Chateauroux, St.Etienne, Agen. And possibly L2K or Aix.

Then there are also a few towered airports without CTR, like Colmar, etc.

St Yan is pretty dead but there is/was an FTO there so there may be a “got to look good” need for ATC. But a lot of the time the tower is empty anyway.

The worrying thing in all this is that in France nobody cares about whether an airport goes bust or not. You could have an airport with 100 employees, of whom 80 will lose their jobs if the police pull out (C+I) but the police absolutely do not care. All that keeps places going is “political connections”.

Remote towers threaten ATC jobs – simple!

Peter I don’t know where you get the impression that no one cares if an airport goes bust in France. Perhaps you could give an example of one that has gone bust and disappeared without anybody caring.

Not gone bust but lost, reportedly, 1/3 of its traffic. Quite a few N French airports. I’d say Cherbourg lost rather more than 1/3. But Cherbourg is safe because prob100 it is kept as an emergency runway for the nuclear plane nearby.

All this stuff is “death by a thousand cuts”. The bean counters are slowly waking up…

Yes many airports have lost a large slice of their traffic, but that’s a bit different from saying no one cares. There are very few airfields that relied on UK GA traffic.
It’s usually a loss of a CAT route that causes the big problem. GA is just peripheral except at airports like LFAT or Calais. And in the case of Calais it lost most of its ga traffic when UK ATOs from Southern England were no longer able to use it so easily for IFR training.