Originally Posted by
Bob Viking
I’m not going to address everything you said but I do have two points.
Firstly, flying pay has been called Recruitment and Retention Pay for years now. The powers that be are doing their level best to get rid of it but soon enough they may find the true meaning of the saying ‘no bucks, no Buck Rogers’. Maybe the RAF need to accept that pilots are a specialisation that need to be paid more than others of the same rank. There I said it.
Secondly, the RAF (and the Navy in their own way) got rid of loads of students back in 2010. Aside from the poor students that had their dreams crushed the whole episode left a very bitter taste across a far broader spectrum of people. It also left a bubble that worked its way through the system.
Is it any coincidence that we have faced a pilot and particularly a QFI shortage over the last few years? Those pilots would all have been well into their second and third tours by now.
BV
Bob, I quite agree that a Flt Lt Pilot should be paid more than a scribbly, or even an ATCO, but only while he's a Pilot. Not when he or she is doing an Ops job for 18 months, or holding while they get to try out for some other role having been chopped, or carrying a bag for some senior Thruster at High Wycombe.
As for the bubble working through the system, that's what's wrong just now. A cull is the best cure for that. I don't think those guys would actually have been ready to be QFIs, having done two tours, as they would not in fact have been trained, that's part of why they were culled.
The shortfall that will happen, will happen anyway. You can't go back and train people five years ago, so that you have their experience now.
So instead of letting the held up students work their way to the front line and be at a leaving point (in terms of time served or emotionally) after only one tour, why not train, in a reasonable timescale, the recent joiners, so that there is potential for getting a useful return of service from them?