TOD wrote:
Why not bin the entire Typhoon programme, selling the existing aircraft overseas, retain a flight of Sea Harriers at London City for the supposed Q task, and put all the savings towards helping the business end of the RAF and its people?
Well that will stir up a hornet's nest, no doubt as you intended, but you have a point!
Throughout the first world war the British Army kept the cavalry in readiness behind the lines, awaiting their moment to exploit a breakthrough by the infantry, in order to pour through the gap and enable a breakout and the reversion to a more mobile form of warfare. And they waited, ...and waited. By the end of the war mobile warfare was again possible, but technology had moved on and it was tanks not horses that made it possible. I wonder if we are not now facing a similar situation . As the Taliban Air Force is conspicuous by its absence, air superiority is a given in sandy places. There is little doubt that eventually the RAF will have to fight for it at some time in the future, but what with and where? Meanwhile the Typhoons wait... and wait, but are at the moment irrelevant to the matter in hand. If CAS is interested in the operational side of the RAF, he would be better off flying in something that is actually engaged in one of the two wars his political masters have landed us with. But much better still, stay in the office and try to solve some of the insuperable problems that the RAF now faces, like the airworthiness of those same operational aircraft!