He must indeed be a MurdochGatesHalliburton hack. Everyone else knows that the rump of Royal Air Force was finally stood down back in 2018, and took its rightful place in History, alongside the Royal Observer Corps, the Fleet Air Arm and the Worshipful Company of Archers. The last few cockpit attendants who were still current on the STOVLshytefyghter (known as the 'Shovel' for its handling characteristics and load-carrying capabilities), did join the two Blaircraft Carriers for the final farewell cruise around the drowning islands of the Pacific and Indian Ocean the following year, but that was in FAA uniform and culminated in the tying up of the rusting hulks alongside the now closed UN building on the East River and the new FauxNews building on the site of the former Palace of Westminster repectively.
It was entirely reasonable to close out the former UK armed forces in the way that President McCain decided to do at the beginning of his third term. Following the incorporation of Puerto Rico, Britain and Cuba into the Union, there really wasn't any need for the former UK to have any self-operated defence forces. It was quite sufficient to keep a few soldiers in the Royal Artillery to enable a 42 gun salute to be fired in honour of the President on his visits to AirstripOne and to retain the Britain National Guard unit with which Governor Jenna Bush of London occasionally needs to teargas any terrorists in Hyde Park who refuse to chant the daily Pledge of Allegiance at 9am every day.
In the final Defence Review prior to the final dissolution of Parliament, so appropriately called "Cry Freedom", it was explained that the streamlining of funds directly from the Exchequer to the US Treasury was vastly more efficient than the cumbersome method of putting billions through middle men such as the firms like Boeing and LocMar which own the GOP and the White House.
Following the unfortunate vitrification of Persia and the Arabian peninsula in the friendly fire incidents which so firmly placed the word "nookuler" into what had previously been known as the English language, and following the now unopposed establishment of Zion's borders as being bounded by the Nile and the Euphrates, and following the forced removal of the surviving terrorists who used to be called Palestinians, and following the unopposed accession of HalliburtonExxon's vertically integrated oil monopoly over all petroleum resources in the now free world, there really is no need for NATO's servant members to have any defence forces at all. It's quite sufficient for all world citizens to continue to pay their subscription and user fees directly to MGH and they can now do so on their CheneyCard.
The MGH hack was right about the A400M eventually entering service, but it's no longer a military aircraft. It's operated on a Halliburton subcontract by VirginAirabiya and there's a Rumsfeld Clause in the contract so the contractors can charge whatever they bloody well want to for providing logistics services to the Free World. It was questioning the legality of this, in his interview with Saint Condoleeza, that earned Sir Jeremy Paxman his 499 year sentence in the Coningsby Re-education Centre. His cellmate, George Galloway who retired as the Chairman Emeritus and Security Advisor of BanglaBimanBMIbeMyBabyTonight, got a mere 199 years for asking about the legality of the 2016 ban on Muslims and swarthy folk travelling by public transport.
The War Against Terror, Saint George's much ridiculed and so unfortunately acronymed job_for_life scheme, turned out to be much more lucrative than his father's equally unwinnable and equally unendable War On Drugs. Where T.W.A.T trumped WOD was in connecting the US oil industry directly into the arms industry and vice-versa. It formed a closed loop which perfectly captures the entire combustion cycle of war/oil/war.
As for the British aviation scene, it's lovely History, that's all.
As for the future of cockpit attendants in warplanes, forget it. They're going to be as useful in aerial combat as fightingmen on horses were in the late 20th century: wonderful spectacle and lots of misty-eyed nostalgia, but somewhat impractical in the 2030s.