Originally Posted by
chinook240
If things continue to deteriorate in the airline industry, standby for a wave of recently left rejoiners, many who left with valuable instructional and examining qualifications. Will the military welcome them with open arms in preference to ab initio aircrew, further extending the into productive service times?
I should imagine that the RAF would look to send rejoiners straight to OCU courses, ideally short ones, thereby bypassing the MFTS bottleneck entirely. That has certainly been the case in the past; it depends how long they’ve been away and whether they’re in recent flying practice. Manning might even be able to be selective to minimise training requirements if there is enough interest. The question for ab-initio recruitment and pipeline times would then be, can the OCUs cope? The good thing there is that course syllabi and aircraft and staff numbers are all 100% within the RAF’s gift. The front line needs to grow quicker than MFTS can output at the moment, and getting the front line up to full manning might reduce the current pressure to expand flying training capacity. Longer term, there will be a need to avoid creating a demographic ‘blip’ , especially if outflow reduces, so I wouldn’t see it affecting ab-initio recruitment significantly: the MFTS sausage machine will need to be kept primed.