Unfortunately, yesteryear’s flying gloves can be incompatible with today’s touch screens and ever more complex HOTAS. Have a look on YouTube and you will see many ‘modified’ gloves with fingers and thumbs missing on modern Fighter Jock’s gloves. I agree, MDC splatter is probably the worst risk, but then again many canopies go ‘in a oner’. There is supposed to be a mod inbound for gloves to be painted with something to help with touchscreens - that doesn’t aid the HOTAS issue though. Maybe we should go back to the ergonomic slums of cockpits, that you could operate with club-hand and stumps, of the Lightning, Harrier GR3, SHar, Hunter, Bucc or Phantom (other slums were available!).
As for length of time in training. Yes, MFTS has been a bit of cluster, but it is nearly where it should be (I would say 80%). However, for these students then you need to cast your minds back to 2010 when the SDSR effectively sacked 170x RAF student pilots; those who survived endured a 2-3 year hold waiting for EFT, but when they got there the props kept falling off the Tutors that introduced more delay, then Tucano went slow for a bit and finally Hawk T2 had a few moments (remember the loss of power incident) - it all adds up for an unfortunate few for Flying Training edging out to 9 years from start to finish OCU. We also have students holding a year or so at the moment (reducing fast), and that is a different matter of changing 5x training aircraft types inside 2 years - that has not gone as well as planned, but is finally starting to deliver as planned. However, that is at the rate required by the SDSR in 2010 and the enhancements for the growth dictated by the SDSR 2015 is still being rolled out and will take up to another couple of years or so. So as ever, we can all chuck spears at the contract, but the requirement has changed so many times that the program never really stood a chance of instant success - not helped by a rather odd set of choices in aircraft types!
Of course, for those caught up ‘in the holding pattern’ in the middle of this transition, it is pretty bloody frustrating. But then again, they will have one of the best jobs in the world when they get there and I would hope it is worth the wait. There are also people working on several significant improvements to the training pipeline and this should increase capacity and bring the length of time training well back under control. Time will tell if we should have a shared optimism that these improvements will do the job.
