Capt Sand Dune is on the money.
The shortage of RAAF pilots is a systemic one due to the gross lack of senior leadership over the past 15 years, plus political interference by ministers, all of whom do not comprehend captaincy development beyond their own limited (often single pilot) experience. Calls to change the RAAF pilot training pipelines have been 'disregarded' for years by the senior leaders with their 70's - 80's thinking. They are directly responsible for dismissing the solutions.
They have failed to understand that the previous system of numerous caribous, RAAF helicopters, draggies, plus 2 FTS/CFS jet ops generated early captains for early commands and experience suited to move up and skipper the bigger / faster metal and so fill all the holes. The system was self-sustaining and could regenerate quickly. Now the helos are gone (we used to have 300 helo pilots all trained on macchi jet, many of who ended up flying fast jets), the remaining caribous will be pushed against the fence (standby for news on that one). Fast jet pilots now have to train on four types rather than the previous three (high costs and additional 6-8 months than in the past to train),ten draggies have been replaced with six Kingairs with more stringent command requirements, and the training jet ops are long gone whilst the PC9 (unpressurised, no radar, no antice, 80s vintage systems) is mainly a powerful low-level aerobat whose $20Mil glass upgrade ($17 Mil spent already) was dumped during 2007 to avoid further cost embarrassment during an election year. Meanwhile the RAAF inventory has moved into glass cockpits, lots of automations and more heavy metal with longer timelines to command. The whole system now does not now produce the numbers of pilots in time nor adequately experienced for the jobs. Now a boggie out of 2FTS course cannot get an operational command on a large automated type during their first or sometimes second tour, and at the moment they can be waiting around for 18 months doing admin until type conversion. All this means the system is no longer self-recovering except over a very long period, and will remain so until these senior leaders wake up.
Effective solutions were analyzed and developed over many years to set up the very numbers and competencies needed. These were presented to CAFAC, but disregarded within minutes on simple whims...preferring to be focused on simple issues that sprang to mind like how long the PC9 would last, and when another bonus could used to temp stayers.
This "share pilots" idea is yet another naive puff of smoke from senior leadership to find a cheap solution without an understanding of complex systemic, industrial and personnel issues. It will not solve the underlying problem that the training and experience-generating pipelines are broken. (so is recruiting by the way)
Endat
