Voyager crewing

[cessnapete]

Flying over Brize its noticeable the number of civil charter aircraft parked. The 8 Voyager fleet doesn't seem to do much of this work?
I was told the AirTanker civil crewing is approx. 8 crews per hull, the requirement for 24 hour aircraft availability.
Apparently RAF crewing is 3 perhaps 4 crews per hull nowhere near enough for airline type availability. An A330 civil operation would be looking at 16\18 or more hours a day utilisation.
I noticed in Calgary, the RAF crew night stopped the aircraft for rest, before returning to UK the next day, instead of a using a slip crew, who would be on the way after a couple of hours turn around, releasing the aircraft for use on arrival Brize. Positioning crews to keep the aircraft in the air does not seem to be an RAF habit.
With extra crews could not most of the MOD charters be covered, saving a few mil£££?
We used to keep aVC10 tanker on permanent s\by in the Falklands to support the Tyhoon. Do we keep a new Voyager there? With little prospect of another imminent invasion, surely a few Typhoons could be trailed there at short notice if required.

[ACW418]

CessnP

See your PM's.

ACW

[Fg Off Bloggs]

Just back from a jolly holiday in the Falklands to visit daughter there! In discussion with the hosty on G-VYGG, Air Tanker Ltd's only A330-200 in service in and out of Brize, she explained that currently the company only has one aircraft and, with 2 flights to and from MPA each week, that aircraft is fairly heavily committed to that route. However, she did say that she had done Calgary and AKR with that aircraft since they took up the RAF commitment. She said that they had PFI provided 5 tankers to the RAF and hoped for another PAX A330 on their inventory next year. She also stated that they man the FI route by placing one crew at Ascension to do the FI/ASI shuttle for 18 days solid and then they dead head it back to Brize whilst another crew takes over. Meanwhile other crews, awaiting their 18-day stint in ASI, do the Brize/ASI shuttle (predominantly night flying).

Upon arriving back at Brize I counted rather more than 5 'tanker' A330s on the ground there and one imagines that others were airborne supporting ops elsewhere! Certainly, my soon to be son-in-law was shipped back last year from an Ex in the ME by tanker (it tanked his jets whilst the troops were on board) and again, very recently on the return from an exercise in FE, was trooped again in a tanker!

So I guess the answer to your query is that we do what we do operationally with our RAF marked jets whilst the Air Tanker Ltd people get on with the routine route flogging!

I speak with no experience of trucking whatsoever, I'm a FJ man, but merely recount recent experience and the words from the quite attractive horse's mouth!

Bloggs!:cool:

[Ken Scott]

'Positioning crews to keep the aircraft in the air does not seem to be an RAF habit.'

Cessnapete - it most certainly used to be 'an RAF habit' when we had the manning to do so but recent manpower cuts & retention difficulties mean that we have barely enough crews to meet normal tasking let alone extended slip patterns. And that's the way the RAF bean counters like it.

[Willard Whyte]

Sorry, read title as "Voyeur crewing".

Anyhoo, recall there being plenty of slip crew exs & ops, on '130Ks at least. Normally somewhere sh1t though, thus not Stateside.

[BBadanov]

" from the quite attractive horse's mouth!"


Hmmm, Bloggs - what did Mrs Bloggs say about this mile-high encounter?


And Falklands for a hol? I guess an improvement on the East Midlands.


Sorry I will miss you this Friday.

[cessnapete]

Retention becomes harder I suppose as the RAF A330 course is given by an EASA ATO. At the end you can apply for a shiny new free ATPL (CAA fees not included!)

[Wycombe]

Sounds like the SA Schedule is operating the same as it did in the days of the L1011, with a crew positioned in ASI to do the southern portion and night-stopping in MPN.

Hardly efficient use of a very expensive new asset. Surely it could do other trips if it didn't spend what must be >30 hrs per week parked "down south".

[BEagle]

Wycombe wrote:
Hardly efficient use of a very expensive new asset.

Why do you think that? Don't forget that the small size of the Air Movs unit at MPA and the processing of significant numbers of incoming / outgoing military passengers will mean much longer load turn round times than would be experienced at a typical civilian airport. Turning the jet is no more difficult than it would be elsewhere, although keeping an A330 and a Voyager ready for flight will be a challenge when the weather turns bad as the hangar is too small for an A330.

Quite often it is also necessary for outgoing / incoming personnel to complete handover / takeover briefs, so the tried and tested schedule seems reasonable enough to me, with a crew change at ASI. Do they still make you sit in that cage?

However, using a Voyager for in-theatre AAR support is perhaps a different matter.

[PapaDolmio]

Ahhhh, the good old slip pattern. I remember a crew being sent on a Cope Thunder slip that was just Lyneham-Goose Bay and return 18 hrs later. They ended up being gone about a week.

[High_Expect]

How do you plan to pre position crews when the air bridge itself provides almost all the scheduled services to the Falklands??? Swim?!?

[Wycombe]

Take your point to some extent BEags, but maintain that no commercial operator would have an a/c sitting around for that long.

That 30 hours could be used running the aircraft out of BZZ on a couple of "short-haul" rotations, or probably even a trip to somewhere like YYC and back in that time (crew resources permitting).

Having witnessed, and been part of the operation at MPN (albeit in the days of the T*), I see nothing different to a fairly standard airline turnaround - weather permitting!

High_Expect - all* you surely need is another crew pre-positioned in MPN (like the ASI crew) and the aircraft keeps flying around the route.

(*I do accept that the "all" may be beyond the scope of current crew resources)

[ShotOne]

Your main issue, cessnapete, that of much (most?) MOD air transport being contracted out, long predates the Voyager and, unless there's a total policy change, this will continue long after it's retired.

Whether we like this or not, it's been policy for decades so it shouldn't come as a shock. And while some lament the passing of "the good old days"(when?) arguably, precedent supports current policy. Historically, even going back to WW1&2 and even to the Napoleonic wars, our forces were mostly transported by hired civilian troopships rather than RN warships.

In the past, the government retained more control by issuing contracts to UK companies. Regrettably, although in theory the policy hasn't changed, often the only UK part of the company is now a brass plaque, with the aircraft and crew coming from all sorts of far-flung locations.

[PapaDolmio]

Preposition on the preceding flight usually and wait, hopefully it's somewhere civilised. Hardly an economical use of crews sometimes.
In times gone by, for a major exercise the first aircraft off would position the slip crews. There was a story in Lyneham folklore of several crews checking in for such a flight only to discover that no one had actually tasked a crew to fly the aircraft out of Lyneham.

[Arty Fufkin]

Wycombe,

I think you'll find that all the commercial charter operators since the RAF handed the airbridge over, of which Airtanker is the latest in a line of many, have used the same nightstop MPN. That's what the customer (MOD) has always demanded, for reasons as explained by Beagle.
Oh, and as far as I'm aware, AirTanker don't fly Voyagers, the RAF Do.

[Onceapilot]

Oh boy, my sides are aching. The big wheel goes around, only now it costs £1,500,000 per day to stand still and, we have diiddly squat tanker resources!

OAP

[3engnever]

OAP, don't leave us hanging like that; 'diddly squat Tanker resources'?

[The Nip]

Arty Fufkin,

At least one charter company, think it was the Icelandic, had their slip crew at MPA. They were doing 2 hour t/r and some of the handovers were carried out at the terminal.