Orac - the same people who gave us our thirdhand VC10K2s and our secondhand VC10K4s!! The MoD has never paid the market price for the RAF's 'Force enablers' (my original phrase!) - and now that their worth has been proved yet again as it was in the Falklands War, Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo......, it's about bŁoody time that serious funding was allocated to a next-generation AAR/AT aircraft instead of the RAF's share of the defence vote merely fuelling just the BWoS Bureaufighter, Nimrod Y3K and Bristol Bureaucrat monetary black holes!
Ivor - but aren't they grudgingly providing some MFI flat-pack portacabins for the winter? Presumably the readily available nearby accommodation is reserved purely for visiting Melchetts...
From the Daily Scoop: "Britain's contribution to the US assault on the Taleban is threatened by penny-pinching MoD bean counters. The RAF's air-to-air refuelling aircraft crews, described as the 'silent heroes' by their grateful US Navy and Marine Corps 'customers' are being forced to live in squalid tents on their airfield because the MoD refuses to permit them to live in the readily available local accommodation. Not that such inconvenience was afforded to recent big-wig visitors, of course! But the mixed-sex RAF crews are getting on with the job despite the conditions, lack of US-style 'tax-breaks' or Combat Pay and are providing their vital 'Force-Enabling' service to US warplanes around the clock. But, when the airline industry recovers from the doldrums, how many of these pilots will remember how they were treated during the Afghanistan War - and will vote with their feet? Is it really too much to expect the penny-pinchers in Whitehall to put their hands in their pockets to show some tangible support to the New Few?"
[ 11 November 2001: Message edited by: BEagle ]