UK LARS service - how can it be improved?

I'd like more communication and interlinking between the LARS units.

Flight Information Services (FIS) get around €6m a year in Germany and they provide deconfliction service with radar throughout the country. In a few places, the military controllers assume FIS responsibility during their opening hours but there are handovers. Above FL100 ATC are responsible (class C) but they also provide FIS unless they have a very good reason not to and refuse VFR.

I always wondered why they UK have such a complex and hard to understand setup that apparently isn't even cheap.

Achim,

agree on your statement, but one correction: what German FIS provides is not really a "deconfliction service". It's more like "traffic service", i.e.: they issue traffic warnings (workload-permitting only) but they usually don't issue recommended headings in order to steer away from other traffic. I understand that UKs "deconfliction service" is mainly for pilots flying OCAS IFR, which obviously are not able to identify other traffic and thus not able to determine which is the most suitable avoidance action.

Below is the feedback I sent in:

As requested at the last meeting, I have been out gathering feedback from various elements of GA.

The amount of feedback is very large, and I don’t intend to repeat it all to you, but I have tried to extract the flavour and the conclusions:

Hours of Service

LARS is least available when most needed, at weekends.

The RAF provide LARS services when they are operating during the week, principally for the protection of their own aircraft – and the risk to weekend pilots is reduced by the lack of high speed military aircraft. However, the number of light aircraft is vastly increased at weekends. LARS should be available at weekends.

There is not a huge demand for service outside the hours of daylight.

One respondent suggested that LARS funding be limited to weekends only, March to October, to focus funds on where they are required.

Capacity

Just when LARS is most needed – sunny weekends – the controllers are overwhelmed by demand.

The more traffic in the sky, the greater the risk of collision and CAS bust, but that is just when the frequencies are flooded and everyone who can get through is put on BS.

Joined up sectors

Sectors are too small and overlap too much. Larger sectors result in less handover, less confusion as to provider and less opportunity for multiple agencies

There are certain safety advantages if the area of coverage given by a civilian operator is increased. For example if the LARS service were to be provided by East Midlands a PPL could potentially be handed to EMA shortly after leaving the Humberside, or Leeds Bradford area and remain with that controller, or at least that frequency, until transferred to Farnborough who would provide cover to the Isle of Wight. That would reduce a pilots’ workload.

Coverage

Large areas of the country have no LARS coverage at all.

The gaps should be filled where possible but traffic density should be a key arbiter of where services are essential or just ‘nice-to-have’.

Technical Coverage

The radars used at airfields seem to be particularly prone to interference from weather and other clutter (from roads, for example.)

ATSOCAS/LARS is needed most in poor weather and it is ironic that that is when it is at its technical weakest.

Coverage Documentation

Even the AIP coverage chart is known to be theoretical, and that is not usable in cockpit. Maybe graphics could appear on the 1:500,000 chart showing where squawk and frequencies changes should be expected.

Centralised Feed

Most LARS is provided using the radar of the airfield providing the service. Much better feeds are often available from NATS. Most non NATS units take a feed from one of the NATS radars, this is phenomenally expensive, they want £52K per annum and a twenty five year contract to supply the information. This price cannot be justified in commercial terms, it is pure profiteering! If NATS want LARS to work, they should provide a feed free or at cost.

Type of Provider

Units which are based at airports inside CAS do not generally like working traffic OCAS, but regional airports in Class G are well suited and benefit from doing so. Farnborough and Exeter are fine examples.

There appear to be several regional airports which would positively like to be considered for inclusion in LARS. Blackpool, Gloucestershire and Cambridge have all expressed interest.

Conclusion

There seems to be quite a reasonable consensus among GA users about LARS:

• It is broke and it needs fixing.
• It should not be directly funded by GA, as

    1. the requirement is created by CAT needing CAS and thereby creating restriction of Class G.
  2. GA already pays significantly by way of fuel duty and VAT.

• LARS funding should be withdrawn from RAF providers. They are principally providing LARS in order to protect their own airspace and will presumably continue to provide ATSOCAS for that purpose without LARS funding. With a couple of notable exceptions, RAF coverage is weekday, working day only, just when it is needed least. RAF ATC is taxpayer funded anyway, and there should be no need for a (anyway rather small and indirect) NATS subsidy.
• LARS funding should be focussed on a small number of regional centres where it could be used to make a real difference. 6 units getting £1m each will be able to invest more and provide a better service than 29 getting £200k each. These units should be mandated to provide 7 day per week, hours of daylight services (say with a limit of 7am-9pm local).
• LARS resources should be focussed on weekends, such that provision matches demand.
• Regional centres should be provided a wide area feed from NATS radars as cheaply as possible. As they are getting to the point where NATS (through LARS) is actually funding a very significant proportion, if not the whole, of their ATSOCAS provision, it would seem to be a case of Peter robbing Paul to then charge for the feed.
• The location of the regional centres should be discussed, but there are clearly already successful regional providers in the LARS system, such as Farnborough, Cardiff, Bristol, Exeter, Southend, Norwich, Newcastle, Teesside, Coventry etc. but equally there is none in Scotland, where Inverness, Dundee and Aberdeen are the obvious contenders, nor in Northern Ireland. At the same time Cambridge, Gloucestershire and Blackpool are all interested in participation.
  
• If NATS were to be reasonable about the cost of feeds and comms, it would even be possible to load share across regions. For example, it might be thought over-provision to have a region in each of Scotland and NI, given the relatively lower traffic levels compared to London or the Midlands, so why not have a combined coverage of both from one centre in, say, Dundee or Aldergrove? Similarly, given training, if there is over capacity in the South-West, could it be “lent” to Farnborough on a sunny Sunday?

I hope that this is helpful.

Rather than spreading the money out to various other providers (be they regional airports, the military, whoever...), could you not just use the £6m to provide a full nation-wide radar service OCAS through London / Scottish Information?

Someone mentioned it costing about half a million a year to staff a full(ish) time ATC desk. Well, for £6m you could staff 12 such desks and divide the UK up into 12 OCAS sectors.

And Dave, very few of us in GA will agree with you that arguments about CAT paying are tenuous at all. It is very simple - as long as we start from a basic position that we all (in theory) have the same basic right to use the air. Businesses using the air do not have a greater right to be there than anyone else.

If legislation is passed (as it is) to restrict use of the air for the benefit of some businesses, then those businesses can bloody well pay for the inconvenience they cause for everyone else. And if LARS really only does exist to minimise CAS busts, then they can bloody well pay for the lot of it.

It's a simple trade. Give up 'your' airspace, and I won't demand a radar service.

Graham, I'm a firm believer in 'user pays'.

Yes Dave so are most of us, SO if CAT wish to have large volumes of airspace effectively denied to others then they should pay BY VOLUME for that exclusivity. Surely that would be fair since they recoup all there costs and a bit more besides from fare paying passengers. GA on the other hand by and large pays its own way, including the fees and taxes heaped upon it.

Yes Dave. Radar services are required because CAT wants a known environment and large chunks of airspace closed off to non-commercial users. If they want that, they can pay for it.

Thankfully, the thinking that makes policy at the moment appears to closer to ours than yours. Light GA doesn't pay at the point of use for ATC (we pay duty on our fuel, unlike CAT), and if it were introduced, you can bet your bottom dollar that takeup would be zero. Then we'd start infringing, you'd start squealing, and we'd be back where we started.

The unionisation and 1970s working practices that stop London Info FISOs looking at a radar screen need to be dismantled. Every aspect of aviation seems to be 30 years behind the real world. If it wasn't serious, it'd be hilarious.

I'm a firm believer in 'user pays'.

Yeah, but this doesn't work. Let me explain why:

1. Access to Airports. Every GA pilot has seen it in the UK. The big come along and with all their handling and security requirements, and consequently squeeze out the small, just like what happened at Southampton. It shouldn't cost THAT much to land, 'handle', and park a light aircraft overnight at Edinburgh or East Midlands or Manchester or Bristol's off-peak times, but somehow with the presence of CAT, it does.

2. Access to Airspace. So much class A airspace everywhere in the UK, perhaps with the deliberate intention to exclude most of GA which flies VFR. Then CAT moans about all the infringements which peculiarly occurs much more so in England than anywhere else in the world. Well provide a better, more organised, cost-effective radar service in lower airspace and let aircraft fly though it safely! Just look at complex areas like New York and Frankfurt to see how they do it.

I'm a firm believer in 'beneficiary pays'.