Originally Posted by
Lima Juliet
Some have taken 7 years and there are onesie/twosie outliers that have taken longer. But you need to take that into perspective. Those that have taken 7 years to get to the Front Line in recent times are the ones that escaped the redundancies in 2011 from SDSR10. Many of whom went into 2-3 year holds whilst the flying training system went onto trickle feed (go figure, we had just made a load redundant and so those that remained weren’t needed all at once!). The time taken from end of IOT to end of OCU, without any holds whatsoever is just shy of 4 years, even in my days of flying training some 30 odd years ago it was around 3-4 years from IOT, through JEFTS, to BFT, to AFT, to TWU and thence through an OCU. Some of us were Fg Offs on the FL, but that was because in those days it took direct entrants without degrees 5.5 years to get to Flt Lt - these days it is 2.5 years for everyone.
The system is still going through the throws of UKMFTS transition, but there is an ambition to get FJ training to end of OCU inside 3 years. However, with the last of the Tucano studes still sitting in a holding pool until mid/late next year there will still be some that have had a sluggish progress through the training pipeline. However, for those joining now and about to start IOT, I would expect to see them on the Front Line in Typhoon or Lightning inside 2025 (ie. around 4 years time).
It was ever thus, and as a second tourist on a FJ squadron I can recall pilots/WSOs that had held for 2 years in the mid/late nineties and taking nearly 6 years to get there. There were also 40-50 somethings on the Sqn at the time that said they could remember times like that in the 70s and 80s. With a 3-4 years training pipeline from walking in the door at Cranwell/Henlow then it doesn’t take much to turn that to 6-7 years post OCU.
But don’t get me wrong, UKMFTS was a bad idea and we should have dug deeper and come up with a better solution than we have...
LJ, thank you for clearing that up.
A few guys who have left the service, including one well known blogger/podcaster who were involved have said this will get worse before it gets better - what do they mean by that?