Shall I explain the money bit? Well, last year in just LFA 1,2 and 3 the MOD used 23,726 flying hours. Yep, thats right, 23,726 hours and thats just LFA 1,2 and 3.
Now Im not sure how much it is an hour to fly a Chinook or a Lynx but I know how much it costs to fly a Merlin and a Seaking and so as a rough guess I reckon the tax payer forked out the tune of well over £10 million. Thats just LFA 1,2 and 3. I haven't got the time to try and work out the rest.
Now those hours are hours booked, not hours flown and so letssay that the utilisation was only 50%....thats still a hefty £5,000,000.
At the moment the entire UK is available as a low flying training area ( with a few exceptions). Why don't we go back to the routines we had prior to 1979 (for those of yu who remember - Beagle will, I'm sure)
Prior to 1979 you could only LF in certain, designated areas. Only the Sqdn hierarchy could authorise LF. Consequently Low Flying was taken much more seriously then than it is now. Now, just about anyone can authorise Low Flying and you can Low fly just about anywhere you want to. If Low flying is such an important skill (as many of you are suggesting) then we need to take it more seriously.