BV
As ever a reasoned and balanced post. My concern on what I hear about Valley and what the spotters would seem to back up are the low numbers of actual jets that fly from the line on a day to day basis. On some spotter sites it states it is as low as 6 aircraft. Now seeing as we bought 28x Hawk T2s and less than half of that seems to be the ‘batting average’, are you really that confident on that rosie picture you are painting?
Here is the spotters log on 13 Jun which was described as an exceptionally good day recently:
Locals all Hawk T.2
ZK028/S, ZK013/D, ZK010/A, ZK011/B, ZK029/T, ZK026/Q, ZK024/O, ZK022/M, ZK012/C, ZK018/I, ZK020/K, ZK037/AB, ZK035/Z, ZK036/AA, ZK031/V, ZK025/P, ZK015/F
Even 17 out of 28 isn’t exactly amazing I would offer?
Now with all of the Saudis, Qataris and other nations buying training courses, plus our own pilots, then QFI workups and everything else like STANEVAL going on, are we really convinced that 17x Hawks on a daily basis is going to crack it? Not forgetting that the RN are also needing FJ pilots in reasonable numbers also.
BTW - I agree that our training system is the future of the Service, so why have we allowed it to slowly decline into a training fleet The NAO grilled the MOD on this 3 years ago:
https://www.nao.org.uk/report/military-flying-training/
The video is here:
https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/...1-168735a1b10b