Flyboy007, thank you for such a heart filled apology. It does mean a lot to many people who have travelled with RAF AT.
I started my career working on VC10s back in 78. I met many Movers and Aircrew. Some were bad, but most were good, nice friendly people. I then moved into the fast Jet World and spent many an hour riding on VC10s, Hercs and Tristars to just about every country in the world on detachement.
Over the years I have noticed that the attitude of the AT aircrew and supporting movers seems to have got worse. (you did meet a few that still cared).
As our operations around the world increased following GW1 then so did the bad attitude of the AT workforce. Suddenly you felt that you were there to support them and they were the "ONLY" important people in any operation.
For years I went back and fore on detachment to the Gulf and it just got worse and worse.
Many of us on fast jet sqns in RAFG moaned and groaned about delays, plan changes etc, but it was just accepted. Obviously we would finally get home to our wives and moan to them and they moaned to us for getting home late!!!!
However, what really brought home the attitude of AT staff was an incident only a few years ago that I will never forget:
A very well known person from a well known RAFG base was killed in a tragic accident. The funeral was to be held in UK. The RAF were brilliant and a VC10was laid on to take friends (and family) back for the funeral. The VC10 was FULL.
Due to weather problems the VC10 had to land at Leeming and we were all bussed many miles to the funeral. The crew of this VC10 were superb by the way, and could not do enough to help.
During the wake we heard that our VC10 had been tasked with a casievac (cant spell that) so another VC10 on a training job in Scotland was tasked with diverting and picking us up. Well that is where the nightmare started.
To cut a long story short, all of us were treated like Cr@p by this new aircrew. We finally took off and not a paper cup of orange squash was offered to us. Funny old thing but it was getting late and we were told that our airfield was closed and we had to go to Koln. We then had to wait for buses to be despached from our RAFG base. We finally got home at 4 in the morning. Only to find that the airfield had never closed. Just what we all needed afer a very sad funeral.
Needless to say our wives never blamed us after we returned late fom future detachements.
Sadly, many of our AT staff, over the years, do not appear to have provided the customer satisfaction that is expected.
I am sure that letters that appeared in the Bruggen Circuit detailing such complaints still exist somewhere.
The bottom line is that we are all here to do a job and quite often we have to do jobs that might hack us off. The boys in Afgan and Iraq are doing the worse job that any one can think of. They deserve better and they dont want to hear excuses such as "short of airplanes, staff, spares etc. They NEED a smile and a "WE WILL GET YOU HOME WHATEVER!! attitute.
Please forgive my spelling.