Originally Posted by
Lima Juliet
How do you know it doesn’t link into STARs, JPA, TAFMIS, etc…? Also, how do you know what it actually does when the tool, to the best of my knowledge, hasn’t been rolled out for use? How many IT gurus do the 3 Services have laying around to run a project like this - to plan, develop, code, deliver and then support a software tool like the one proposed in the link?
I would offer that part of the problem is that for years we have used whiteboards, spreadsheets and magnetic tiles to plan stuff like this. Is it any wonder that all 3 Services end up going feast-famine-feast with their training pipelines if we continue to allow a bunch of mates huddled around a planning board/computer trying to cuff it? (I know how pants that is as I’ve been there).
I, for one, think that having an ‘end to end’ planning tool that looks at a through life pipeline of individuals - recruiting, basic training (Cranwell or Halton), flying training (and the various pipelines), the myriad of extra courses (SERE, RAFCAM, HF&CRM training, centrifuge, etc…), then OCU. But it doesn’t need to stop there either - what about all of the Phase 3 training - IODs, IMLC/AMLC, ASWS and MAA courses. Wouldn’t it be neat to have a singular planning resource for everyone to use and for everyone to see where they and what is coming up?
I would have loved to have had that instead of a whiteboard, some coloured pens and tiles and a bottle of meths! (Which, at times I felt like drinking!)
I admire your confidence in the ability of a system to accurately predict future events. Should such a system exist, I would be inclined to use it to predict the winner of the grand national, do the football pools, predict the lottery numbers etc. The defence budget would be much higher.
Back on planet earth, history tells us that the more systems are interlinked, the more the consultants and the IT contractors benefit. And still the future tends to confound us. Was it not just last month the Bank of England were telling us the recession would last 2 years ( despite the fact they didn’t see it coming) and now it turns out we aren’t in a recession at all ( at least not yet)?
Working out how many people you need to recruit to have sufficient numbers of pilots to fly our diminishing fleet of aircraft is not rocket science.