I would love to have a face to face chat with this £%$£^* of a journalist. Its typical of irresponsible journalism that seems to be the norm these days. He obviously does not realise that 250k is NOTHING for a 23 day exercise. The skills learned on this det would be useful in the UK (snow, mountains, emergencies) Iraq (high density altitudes, emergencies) Afghanistan (High density altitude, mountains and kin big ones at that, emergencies) Kosovo/Bosnia ( snow, mountains, emergencies, high DA in summer) insert any country you like here. I would love to get these journalists up at night in the mountains and doing some snow landings then laugh when they find out adrenaline is brown. If any are reading this WE ARE NOT SUPERMEN JUST TRAIN HARD. The phrase train hard fight easy comes to mind.
Just out of curiosity i wonder where matey boy who works for the mirror stays when he is out and about round the country. Youth hostels with no food all night or 5 star hotel with more than the usual small amount we get to feed us for a day. Maybe we could put him up in the 5 star accomodation we stay in
Just an aside i know a lot of the guys who were on this det and they did get a LOT of benefit from it. A big proportion of the guys had not done any real mountain flying for years, if at all.