"As an aside, I still haven't worked out the value to RN Observers of low level over land nav in their curriculum, and also continental landaways involving a stupidly high instructor/student ratio"
Training is never wasted. Who would have thought we would find observers operating on NVGs over Afghan. Without a very basic grounding in low level nav, the NVG course would have been a lot bigger challenge for them. They are also taught DR Nav even though we have GPS.
One foreign landaway per course is not too extravagant, especially when the Dominie used to fly to Portugal to make one radio call!