Originally Posted by
pr00ne
Having been involved in things like this several times over the last 4 decades, both as an adviser and a practising departmental manager, I can assure you that any half decent industry or business would not have allowed itself to get into this situation in the first place! There would be strange things being done, like forecasting, model demand planning, attrition forecasting, output demand planning, scenario gaming and worst case scenario options. All of these things are alien to your average VSO, which explains why the RAF is in the current fix it is finds itself in, AGAIN!
It sacked 300 trainee aircrew not so long ago, it had retention schemes before that to keep people in, previous to that it had redundancy schemes to get rid of people...
It has massively reduced the value of being aircrew in terms of comparative salary, it has outsourced the responsibility for training output to a private consortium then dicked that consortium around in terms of required output. It has allowed the consortium to invest in tiny training fleets with no challenge or seeming interest.
On top of all this it has massively reduced annual and monthly flying hours. I spoke to 3 Typhoon aircrew recently whose main complaint was that they so rarely get to do what they joined up to do, fly! When I told them that back in my day I could expect a NATO minimum of 280 hours a year and would aim at 30 hours a month, and as a JP I could achieve that, albeit a bit more of a challenge for the more senior types, they were open mouthed. And on top of this they were also weary of constant detachments taking them away from home for lengthy periods, although they were happy with the flying rate on such, operational, detachments. And that is another key issue, whereas in my day we were a practising or rehearsing air force, today's RAF is a genuine war fighting operational force in which you will see action.
I realise that you are being a tad facetious in saying that it's not about the money, because it is, but surely it is also about absolutely crass decision making at the top by VSO's year after year and decade after decade.
Something Is rotten in the state of High Wycombe/Main Building.