Gareth
there is indeed a lot of good advice here; advice that you should heed. (Bl
dy hellfire - a semicolon on the web
)
You seem to be focussing a lot on the academic requirements, which are not critical for the RAF (or RN or AAC). The academic bar may be set apparently low, but that is because there are other bars set much higher.
As Pontius Nav pointed out in a earlier post, the percentage who makes it from application to the front line is vanishingly small. One can get most jobs from a half-an-hour interview, senior management posts may have a whole day of tests and assessments. The RAF (and the others!) have 3-4 days of assessments, medicals, fitness tests and so on.
More questions will be asked of you about what you have done (community work, Air Cadets, team sports) than what bits of paper you hold or confidently expect to obtain. A maths pass is less important than knowing
instantly how long 47 miles will take at 180 knots (and that's an easy one - most aircrew on this forum will have worked it out quicker than I wrote it - and I'm not that slow a typist).
Many of us here have done it successfully - and we aren't demi-gods (apart from the Harrier pilots - and that's more banter
)
What about your fitness, (do you know what a "bleep test" is?), what about your health (specs, colour vision, asthma?). More people fall by the wayside for those than for insufficient exams!
But go for it! If successful it's the best job in the world (whatever the capbadge). And if you
don't go for it, you may just spend the rest of your life wondering "what if".
And by the way - the answer is 15 minutes and 40 seconds. 180 knots is 3 miles a minute or a mile in 20 seconds. So 48 miles would be 16 minutes, and 47 miles will be 20 seconds less.
That's the kind of maths we're interested in, rather than A* at GCSE!