airpolice wrote:
Ask any of Beagle's vintage how many hours a month they used to do, and whether or not they think they would be as comfortable doing the current hours.
Mate, you have to remember that the aircraft I flew were decidedly mandraulic compared with today's FJs. On my brief time on the F-4 I think we got about 20-25 hours per month; also the simulator wasn't much use for practice intercepts. Even in training, the Gnat used most of one's mental capacity trying to stop it from killing you and it didn't have enough fuel for more than about 50 min airborne time.
The Hawk was much easier to fly, so students were stretched by longer, more demanding trips. At TWU, weaponeering was simpler in the Hawk; we didn't have the Hunter's GGS, but neither did we have those infernal cine mags. But course progress at Brawdy was worse than at Chiv, because we did level bombing rather than SNEB and were less hampered by cloudbase at Pembrey. Nowadays I gather that there is no live weaponeering at Valley on the Hawk T2 and most applied flying is synthetic. OK, the simuators are probably a lot better than the one we had, but applying yourself at 1g is a lot different than at the normal 4g we used for low level manoeuvring or 6-7g for doggers. Pre-RAFFT too, so most people weren't iron-pumping gym queens and found they were quite fit enough to cope with ACM without any 'fitness routine'.
I'm told that the Typhoon is easy to fly, but quite complex to operate in many environments. So hardly surprising that less airborne time is required nowadays. But how will Typhoon and F-35B pilots maintain g tolerance with low airborne time?
Anyway, back to the Phenom. Is 40% of the fleet still U/S? As for the cause, that's bound to leak out one day and I'm surprised that the press haven't already reported it. But why on earth do Phenom pilots need to be taught to fly at anything more than 30 deg AoB in formation, given that's about all any of the RAF's ME fleet needs to use as singletons.