I operate out of Nuthampstead (BKY VOR) and my my most flown route over the past ten years has been Nuthampstead - Calais.
After turning the corner at BPK, I can fly above Stapleford's ATZ if the cloudbase is above 2000ft AGL. If the cloudbase is below that, then a jink to the right is called for to avoid Stapleford's ATZ. This usually gets Farnborough radar agitated.The distance from the edge of Stapleford's ATZ and London City's CTR is 2nm. A nice little corridor for opposite direction GA traffic to negotiate. With the Southend proposal we will have a 3nm corridor between the edge of Damyn's Hall ATZ and Southend's new CTR. Another bottleneck. My alternative routing would be under the Stanstead Class D airspace and then a climb to 3000ft with a transit overhead at Southend. My experence of transits at Stanstead is that they are few and far between, therfore my suspicion is that this is what will happen at Southend.
The commercial boys all want the most fuel efficient routings for the sake of the environment etc. The same applies to GA. We don't want to burn more fuel than necessary either. As a suggestion, why can't Southend traffic go directly out to sea to join the TMA?
Should the day ever dawn that there is a Thames Gateway airport or an expansion of commercial activity at Manston, then I can see the southeast of England being a GA no-go area.
I can't see any benefit for GA in this proposal and it does not serve safety.
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