You don't owe me money, do you Pia Pium? Just kidding - thanks for the kind words.
I once knew a BA trolley tart named Pia. When I say 'knew'.....
Lovely girl though. And she was responsible for the nickname 'trolley tart' being applied to all 101 Sqn cabin supervisors (from captain to corporal) thereafter - it was the nickname she'd been given by her BA captain dad.
I digress.
Anyway, to answer some of your points:
The new aircraft will be a blessing in may ways and a curse in others. Having flown the 10 and the 330, I am glad I dont have to prod the 330.
The KC-30A will refuel by the 'lie back and take it' girlie method. But there is an AFS mod which changes the control laws in receiver mode. There's also an augmented 'bank angle' turn mode, with slow onset and rollout logic, so when flying in non-NAV lateral navigation modes, the pilot can select either bank angle or conventional heading select.
The logic of the ECAM and the incredible nonsense of paperwork in the cockpit compared to boeing procedures will have the RAF baffled for a while working the new beast out.
I will be
most interested to see how the RAF adapts to Airbus methods! For the A310, Airbus produced the FCOM Supplement which is the effective AAR SOP. When I say 'Airbus', actually it was written by me.
The sidestick logic is great for manual flying in general, but to sustain contacts with the sidestick logic, would be a very hard demand. Trying to land the 330 in a strong crosswind is next to the challenge of a night prod in a climbing turn in turbulence (not nice basically). Good luck to the RAF with the 330, I have flow the 10 and 330 for very many hours and still say the 10 to prod far exceeds the likelyhood of a sucessful contact than a 330 sidestick.
As mentioned earlier, that's why the KC-30A will use the girls' method...
Whats happening to the engineers now, still onboard to operate the refuelling equipment, and WHAT!! no sextant hole in the overhead for the Nav now, are they confined to the galley or in ops now?
With the A310MRTT, it has been proved that the Air Refuelling Operator needs some navigation skills and some engineering knowledge. The Luftwaffe use ex-Tornado WSOs and the CF uses ex-C130 and ab-initio WSOs. It works well. The best part is the Mission Computer Subsystem - it plans and manages all AAR missions. Plan on a laptop, transfer the plan to a USB stick and feed it to the onboard system. Snagless. Only problem is that it isn't allowed to update the FMS automatically, due to certification reasons. But it could... It's like an automatic AARC, except that it doesn't have blonde moments, trash hire cars or get itself banned from Atlanta. Something else whose functionality I designed - and it's
vastly better than anything I've seen intended for FSTA, KC-30A, KC-767J or KC-X! If you go single hose, a revised mission plan is calculated in about 1-2 seconds!! None of the primitive RAPs or NAPs methodology, it computes the plan
exactly.
Beags, we were around 101 at the same time, hi to you and any tanker lads (now lasses) now reading this. (ps, Scoff the boss ring a bell, he came in about the same time I did) I hear Lush is in charge now, LMAO haha, good luck steve, many a party at chateau Lush? Remember Snake? If you live up to his reputation, good on you man> (Oh by the way, what was the donkeys name again who replaced Scoff? he meant well, but man, he should have played alonside Frank Spencer.)
Forgive me, but I don't recognise the name. But hi, anyway. Scoff is now the A400M marketing mate for Airbus Military, Lush is indeed OC101 (I sent him an e-mail congratulating him for the 25th anniversary of the VC10K, but didn't get a reply. One assumes that the RAF e-mail system was up to its usual reliability....). Snake is now an air attache in the US, incidentally.
The chap who took over from Scoff? Not terribly popular, but things actually did need a bit of 'adjustment'. In retrospect, I can understand why he wasn't terribly keen on 'TTF', but to my mind, everything went downhill after 1994 - I finally pulled the black and yellow 9 years later when I couldn't stand it any longer.