Originally Posted by
Sky Sports
I have a friend at work who is an ex-RAF rotary pilot. At the end of his EFT, the whole course, (12 students) had their streaming board, and most wanted FJ naturally. They all had high hopes as they had attained high CBAT scores and got very good reports from EFT.
The briefing before the streaming board started was a bit of a shock. "There are no FJ training slots currently available, so before you go in front of the board, decide now if you want to bid for multi-engine or rotary?"
He was incredibly p!ssed off to find out that on the EFT course that followed, FJ needed 8 of the 10 students, and multi took the other 2. He also knew for a fact that of the 8 that were streamed FJ all but one had worse CBAT scores than he did!
It really is pot luck what you end up flying nowadays, and the best pilots don't necessarily end up flying FJ.
One of the amusing bits about the pilot course was the ice breakers on day 1 of EFT groundschool and every RAF student standing up, regaling us of tales of derring do on the UAS and IOT and how much they wanted to drive a Tornado.
Fast forward 6 months and the same people stood up in the front of the classroom in Shawbury telling us all how much they had wanted to be a Chinook pilot since before they could talk.