Little thread drift...sorry
Interesting, is that the first public admission that 9 MR aircraft is too few?
That caught my eye too. Leaving aside grammatical interpretations as to what they are or are not implying here, it does reflect the reality that what in 1995 was going to take 24 aircraft (and 21 after some turn of the century smoke and mirrors accounting practices) now needs only 9. I am of course aware of force multiplier factors, but then Nimrod 2000 AKA Nimrod MRA4 had heaps of them too did it not??? (Well, the folk building it told me that to my face at BAE in May 1998).
Given that it's not just airframes, its human resource too, one suspects the such things as SAR, 6 hour Stby etc have all long since been reinvented (as indeed they needed to be - no dinosaur here), one can but hope some of the PITA strains on the aircrew cadre, like losing folk for a ****ing month long guard commander duty, have been **** canned too as the bodies can no longer be spared.
No doubt the job will very different, but maybe it will nearer to the what we had in the seventies and eighties (in terms of operational flying and doing the job which we were trained to do and which we loved) than all **** we endured in the nineties.
tl/dr If the scarcity of maritime aircraft and crews means the folk on them will spend more time in the air and less time being *****ggered about on the ground, it will great and I'm insanely jealous.
Have fun and sorry for the thread drift