"On the other hand, service personnel have benefitted hugely from extensive and very expensive flight training at the taxpayers' expense, good wages from a young age and they get a golden goodbye from the MoD in most circumstances."
Go on then, explain how we have benefitted.
Our expensive flying training might make us good at flying military aircraft, but as has been pointed out many times, this does not make us good civvy pilots, and anyway, civvy airlines seem to have absolutely no interest how good you are as long as you pass the minimum on courses/checks, and it certainly does not get us our licenses.
The taxpayer spends a lot of money to make us good at our job, and then gets the full benefit back from us doing our jobs
in the military.
Good wages, dont make me laugh. It is ok, we don't starve, but we don't do it for the money.
Find out what a 20 year captain of a C17 or tristar or VC10 gets and then compare that to a 20yr seniority civvy captain.
Of course along with this is the fact that the Officer also has his
real job of being an officer to do, so we should be compared with management wages for fairness.
Why do you think we get flying pay and retention bonuses to stop us leaving for more money!?
The Golden goodbye, as you call it is the standard payment to all ex military to aid reintegration into the civvy world. Hardly a special gift. Plenty of civvy companies do the same after a long career. Added to this, our pension des not even take our flying pay into account.
To those who are playing the discrimination card, seriously, get a life. I sincerely hope to never end up in a cockpit with anyone who could look themselves in a mirror and honestly believe that an ex mil pilot has somehow hed an easy route into an airline.