Good news for RAF Student Pilots:
My sources tell me that Linton will shortly be a happier place, despite the imminent closure, as (some of) the students there who thought they faced years of holds, will soon be off to a hot and dusty climate to fly jets.
In what has been described as the MoD finally seeing the light, the farce at Valley is to be sidestepped by some students, and the hyper efficient operation at Sheppard AFB in Texas will be training the next batch of RAF Pilots.
MFTS at Valley has almost 50 QFIs and can't produce the quantity or quality of students that the Typhoon OCU need. Indeed some courses at Valley have recently produced no output to the Coningsby OCU at all, but the "course" graduation was still processed, so the civvy contractors got paid just the same. Despite having all the resources they asked for, and effectively taking over the station, the MFTS Contractors have consistently failed to come up with the goods. So it's not much of a surprise that the penny has finally dropped and for the second time, Fast Jet Lead In Training has been outsourced, but this time to an Air Force that knows how to train pilots.
What on earth has been going on at the top of the tree?