They've just shaved £5500 of my future earnings.
But never mind that, just look at how unfair this is to younger pilots. Anyone who, back in the day, trained on gazelle and stayed on gazelle, was bound to get to aircraft commander status long before those who converted straight onto lynx. Many are still on middle/top rate and this will affect them (as it does me).
But if you're an ab initio apache pilot, you will spend a year on CTT and CTR after your pilot course - at this point I'm not sure when they are awarded AC Comd - but even if it is immediately on completion of CTR that means they will be several months behind their brethren that went onto Lynx and therefore penalised as a result -
for the rest of their careers! I do hope that those journalists who rightly lionised the apache pilots in afghanistan recently also pick up on their new pay scheme!
So here we have an Air Corps that not only doesn't pay an FRI to its pilots like the RN and RAF do, it doesn't increment their wages in the same way and in the way that they have been to date!
Now the obvious fact won't have escaped any of you that the overwhelming majority - and probably every man-jack - of officers in the AAC who put this iniquitous rule in place are already on enhanced flying pay, so it won't make a penny's difference to them! A bit like MPs taxing the @rse of us and changing our pension schemes while giving themselves the most generous pay rise and retirement package since Bill Gates thought "maybe I should try working in computers".
I for one shall be inspecting future awards of OBEs and MBEs to see if it correllates with the department responsible for and the signatory to "The Letter" - a letter which will live in infamy - to borrow a phrase from FDR. I have no doubt the medals ought to be cast from an appropriate number of silver pieces.
In a day and age when the Colonel Commandant of the Army Air Corps, Gen Sir Richard Dannatt - an honourable man with whom I have had the privilege to serve -
reminds us all of the Covenant between a nation and its armed forces, it is shaming, frankly, to see this covenant so cynically and cravenly discarded by the very officers sworn to uphold it.
They are beneath contempt.