I got chatting with a bloke a little while ago who was telling me he worked on 216 - I think he said he was a sooty. When I suggested it must be frustrating working with such a temperamental fleet, he said actually no, the majority of the techies loved working on the jet, and did their utmost to turn it for HERRICK trips.
Just as I was thinking what a perfect bloke he was to be working on 216 - or any RAF sqn - he said '...but I've PVRd and am out in 6 months'. Gobsmacked, I asked him why, and he said that, over the years, the RAF has expanded its engineering hierarchy to a point where the jet is over-serviced, particularly because IPTs and other special interest groups are constantly changing the rules, both to keep themselves in a job and/or simply appear to be doing something! He was leaving because he was fed-up being told to over-service the jet by people who didn't know the aircraft.
In some ways this makes sense - home base policy for a RAF Tristar requires the engineers to be given the jet for 8 hours between tasks, and that doesn't include any re-roles or Mover activity. It also confirms what I've thought for the past few years - the lack of any one person with an obvious plan has led to the dilution of frontline staff - by that I mean techies with dirty hands etc - in favour of more desks, policy writers, bureaucracy and current favourite study groups, many of whom only exacerbate the pinch by their absence from anything useful, while adding to the hurdles.