flyboy,
Thanks for your post. Having been at the receiving end of the movers' worst efforts and passengers ire when I've had to pass on the bad news, I appreciate your efforts. I don't think anyone is attaching blame directly to the crews of the aircraft (jeez, did I actually say that to a crab?). Nearly all the AT crews I have met have been true professionals and I know how they want to get the job done. The finger-pointing is aimed at the people higher up who fail to ensure that the system works. Those who secure their own futures at the expense of the British Armed Forces as a whole.
The ones it is aimed at are the jobsworths, who seem largely to be in the movements train and whose managers at various levels just don't give a toss. It can be a thankless task I'm sure. But, as many crabs on this thread like often like to point out to soldiers; they joined, so lump it or leave. Worse still is the attitude of those at Cyprus, and I have personal experience of this in less pressured times. It is reminiscent of the Bishops Court approach to life in NI, "not my problem".
As someone pointed out earlier, the soldiers who rely on the RAF for transport really don't care about the whys and the wherefores, they just want the RAF to do what the RAF are supposed to do in this case, transport them from A to B. Without nause and without problems. It's a service and as from any service they expect it to work. It doesn't matter to them the reason why things go wrong, just get me home on time with as little hassle as possible.
Most soldiers don't have first hand experience, as Maj Loden did, of the RAF's sharp end. What they almost all see is the abysmal AT trail and the degrading and almost inhuman way they're treated by what they see as "the crabs" on their often debilitating, multi-day journey to where they need to be or home from it. Ask any soldier the bit he or she dreads most about deployments and that will usually be 'the move'. And that comes down to one organisation, go and guess who that is. So, for different and often ill-informed reasons, they still see the RAF (rightly or wrongly) as "utterly, utterly, useless" in this one respect.
I've read the often contemptuous comments here from a lot of the AT fleet about the people they're employed to transport around the world. If one word by an RAF officer/NCO conveys contempt of the Army as a passenger to his subordinates, that will spread to the organisation as a whole. I believe that word has spread RAF-wide, and sadly the movement organisation now takes it gospel: soldiers are beneath contempt and as such it matters not how they're treated.
