My understanding was that the officer FRI scheme was due to run for five years, but the actual amount would be subject to annual review as a direct result of changing retention needs ('management tool' and all that yukspeak).
Consider this. The Jaguar flet is supposedly about to fold, along with a possible decrease in other FJ Sqns, dumping a surplus of fast jet pilots into the system. There are already too many ME pilots in the RAF. Other threads on pprune have discussed (I can only presume they are true!!) that the training machine can't actually turn out all the FJ student pilots backed up in the system, and that many F3 pilots are doing one tour and then going on to ground tours because there are too many of them. EFA will make half the FJ navs redundant, and the RAF predicts only needing 100 navs (sorry WSOs!) in just over 10 years, to the extent that people joining as WSOs are already only being offered short service commissions!
Against the list of comments I have just made do people seriously believe the RAF, while 'downsizing' considerably in the next few years if the rumours are correct, will have a numbers problem to the extent that it feels the need to pay large retention bonuses!!!
Actually, thinking about it again, the RAF may reduce the FRI bonus at the 33 point, but increase the one at 38!! Why you ask? Simple, cost cutting at 33, balanced by good
PR increasing the 38 figure. After all they can make the 38 year figure as large as they like if they aren't actually going to offer anyone retention at 38!! (Nice one Sir Humphrey!!)