Originally Posted by
Davef68
Two interesting points (albeit two years old) - the need for more aircraft and (at 8.48) he says after 5 years the RAF owns the T6s, rather than Ascent/Affinity.
Not hard to work out - even with 8 FL sqns (5x Typhoon, 3x F35) you conservatively want to have 4 ab initio Guys hitting streets of the sqn each year. 32 Pilots x 100 hours = 3200 hours. Divide that through 10 airframes and the number of available flying days a year and you can see you start running into issues. This is before you have any wastage (scrubbed due weather, performance, U/S) or include any non student flying (flypast, display, Pax ride or staff training).
However now that Typhoon is moving to more squadrons, even with heavy utilisation of simulation I can see why there isn’t enough T-6.