Flip - if I chill out any more I'll die of hypothermia.....
Fella, I think you're confusing det manning and sqn manning? Aircraft in theatre are manned one to one. There is genuinely no reason to increase that. The aircraft don't need to be hammered 18-20 hours a day. As a fleet (J) we've now "been on det" continuously since Feb 03. Deployed ops flying is now our core business and whilst we still haven't got it quite right we're getting there. Crews do 3 or 4 1 month dets a year (or more in some cases) and in between times they get in the sim or twiddle their thumbs. Whilst on det they work a 14 hour crew day doing routine trash hauling and other bits and bobs. We don't, for perfectly good reasons, work round the clock.
The tasking is (serviceability permitting) pretty easily covered by the current manning/airframe allocation. Increased crewing just isn't needed. It also isn't supportable by our current fleet. Doubling the number of crews we have is totally unfeasible with the number of training aircraft/sims/instructors we currently have. All it would achieve would be a massively increased training and administrative burden at Lyneham for a negligible increase in productivity.
Don't let the ongoing saga of the shiny fleet blur into deployed C130 ops. 500 crews per C130 in theatre would have absoluetly no impact on the time it takes to get people into or out of theatre.
If you're worried about an accident due to fatigue etc don't tell us to double our manning/number of dets etc. The answer is far cheaper and easier. KAF needs to provide quiet accomodation to sleep during the day. They also need to provide a feeder that serves food to those on the det (ie the workers) that work through the night. On my last KAF det my crew rest coincided with 4 meals. 4 out of a possible 90. It's an admin issue we've been fighting for years that shows no sign of ending. The blame for an aircraft accident or incident due to fatigue will lie firmly at the door of the EAW Air Cdre and I happily be the first to give evidence (there'll be a pretty long queue mind).