BA Crews manning RAF Tristars in 1983

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I was part of the team who instigated this arrangement and subsequently was the MOD POC for the year or so that it ran. The background was that we were chartering BCAL airlift to cover the shortfall caused by South Atlantic operations and we identified that approx 75% of this cost could be saved if we instead paid BA to provide crews to operate the Tristars that the RAF had bought from BA and were sitting waiting to be converted to tankers. Fortunately, as a result of selling these aircraft, BA had surplus Tristar crews and were therefore in a position to provide them to the RAF. Whilst the operation was successful and made significant savings there were a few wrinkles. One was that the RAF did not own baggage handling equipment able to reach the Tristar belly hold and there were occasions when the containers had to be unloaded in the aircraft hold.Positioning BA slip crews was a problem, especially to ASI a route only served by RAF AT so getting crews to Brize to catch a VC10 could be problematic. Also as these were now military aircraft albeit flown by civilian crews, there had to be an RAF officer onboard who was the 'aircraft captain' who in the case of diversion or any other untoward event would take charge. We therefore had to have a roster of officers available to do this. On the upside a lot was learnt about operating the Tristar before it entered service as a tanker