Back in the latter days of the Cold War, someone came up with A Great Idea. We would practice off-base operations. So The Plan was to fly from Fairford, not Brize......until They worked out how much it would cost to trundle everyone back and forth in the school bus every day....
, there being no accommodation available at Fairford. So then They had another idea - "Let's operate from a different part of Brize and just
pretend we've deployed". Not
such a daft idea, but ultimately thwarted by the gingerbeering squirearchy who refused to accept 'deployment' servicing rules etc - so all that happened was that everyone was screwed about for no real gain.
Ah yes, I remember my MOB deploying to
Neggurb (which must have taken hours to think up). The sqns deployed by means of a 10-minute journey in a 52-seater coach, replete with full pax processing at the air terminal on the outward journey. Once at their 'new' destination they had to deal with an incredibly thick host nation who would only give out things they were specifically asked for, and all except the career-thrusters rolled their eyes with despairing pointlessness as IntOs churned out meaningless scenarios involving Orangeland, Brownland and Yellowland - the use of traditional red and blue being considered contrary to the wave of
Glasnost sweeping the world. How those exercises flew by...