A&C, not "trying to make myself look clever" merely trying to save the internet some space. However if do you want me to quote your entire post and
then state that you clearly don't understand how we do business then fine.
It is clear that by civil standards the aircraft are under used, perhaps you should start to ask why when deployed on tactical tasks you only have one crew
What on earth have civil standards got to do with anything? Your're comparing apples and orangutangs. To be fair, I don't know you from a hole in the ground and you are entitled to your opinion but the military and civil worlds are different. Sure, one can draw comparisons between our shiny fleet moving lots of people (or not) from A to B and the way the civvies do it but I'm afraid the grubby world of the C130 is very different.
I think it is time for the RAF to have a hard look at the way it conducts business and suspect that the one crew per aircraft attitude started when the air force had a lot of aircraft, now it is due to the critical overstreach in manpower that I see when ever I talk to guys I know in the RAF.
Sorry, and you are? It's true the RAF is overstretched in places but I would hazard that the C130 pilot world isn't one of them (other than in terms of aircraft which are getting too knackered too quickly from being flown too much
) The deployed C130 could not sustain the flying hours of being worked 24hrs a day and to be honest they don't need to be. The one crew per aircraft "attitude", as you rather disparagingly refer to it, has nothing to do with the good ole days and me painting my name on the side of the old kite and everything to do with managing our fleet and personnel to create the best minimum arse-ache/maximum efficiency balance for all concerned. We don't have the aircraft/simulators/instructors or indeed requirement to sustain a massive expansion of C130J crews.
Basically (good basically) you're entitled to your opinions and as a civilian airline pilot they're probably fairly well educated opinions but don't be fooled into thinking that your procedures/rules etc have read-across or relevance to what we do on ops.
herkman
It should be understood, and I would be surprised if at least Marshalls did not know, that all J models come from the factory plumbed for externals.
Indeed they do however Lockheed were asking about £100 billion per tank and so we said no thanks. I didn't think the K tanks could be switched across to the J (1553 stuff?). That said, even if they could Marshalls would make a pigs arse of it and they'd end up costing more than the aircraft itself
Ideally, we'd buy some of the US
Js and they'd come with all the good stuff already fitted - we only really need external tanks on a few aircraft.
HQ2
Didn't we sell off a load of our C-130s a few years back?
Yes, because it was part of the deal for the
Js plus they were all pretty shagged anyway....