I wasn’t clear enough 
The airfield table is an internal DGAC classification of traffic level. They are called airport groups. The higher the group, the more ATCO are paid, the more staff they have etc…
Nothing to do with airspace.
But, about the class E that is to be deleted, this is about airspace, not the airport group.
Are you sure they are airspace classes and not just DGAC classifications in terms of facilities? AFAIK there is no airspace class F in France, and if there is it is only temporary as per SERA.
I found more info.
The towers to be closed are among the F & G classes in this table. no number has been given yet.
Note that this table is probably old. L2K is among the G class.
DGAC said no tower will be closed without the approval of local stakeholders. I doubt it.
The APP units will be reduced from 29 to 15. The list of 12 I gave above is therefore incomplete. Clermont-Ferrand seems to be among the ones to continue.
The FIC centers could be two instead of one (no difference). They discuss about the trainings and tools given to the FISOs.
A small phrase from a union caught my attention : DGAC pays attention to the Class E airspace whose disappearance it legitimately seeks.
French ATC is on a hard strike this thursday. Good luck
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.
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…
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.
Add to that St Nazaire, Bergerac, Caen, Dinard, Quimper, Brive, Rodez etc…
ATC towers will become the exception, AFIS the norm.
It does not worries me.
Lets hope the central FIS unit will not become London Info-like (QNH is XXX, remain OCAS, bye)
CAS will shrink with:
St Yan, like Biscarosse, Muret and Melun have a base of DGAC’s flight school. We will see if they choose these places to be closed. These towers are still open for pure internal relations and comfort.
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!
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.
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?
