Treating the symptoms or the cause?
Good leaders or not, the way I see it recent events have shown that people need to have a backup plan as demonstrated by what happened to the Nimrod, Harrier and F3 boys and girls. My guess is that Sentinel won’t be needed after HERRICK, Tristar is on it’s way out along with the VC10. FSTA is on the horizon along with A400M but who knows... The Merlin may or may not be off to the Navy and puma 2 may or may not come in along with uncertainty over the buy of more Chinooks. If you have a family to support (as a lot of us do) you need to have something in your back pocket.
Due to the levels of equivalence for UK QSPs (correct me if I’m wrong here) if you’re anything but a ME captain, your looking at anything from £20,000 to £40,000 (depending on your situation) to get your ATPL(A).
As I’ve explained, if flying is the only thing that you want to do (and not some desk - worst case: BALO or other S%@*T job) and you need ensure that you can support yourself and your family, it’s the only thing to do.
After having spent that much money, you might start to wander if it’s really worth staying in an organisation that: gives you little job satisfaction on the whole, causes quite a lot of strain to your closest relationships, has frozen your pay, has made it much more difficult or impossible to pay for your children to go to a good school, has taken away allowances that were once there, and if the Hutton report is anything to go by will seriously change your future pension to your financial detriment.
All the time you spend treading water in an organisation that has consistently taken entitlements away from you, you are missing opportunities to get onto the ‘seniority ladder’ of the airlines.
We all joined, I guess because we love flying, wanted to change the world for the better and work with great people. Well there is not much fun flying to be had anymore, politics and in-fighting reduce the impact of the good that is done (although I’m sure that we still do some) and there are professional dedicated people in the civilian world.
I think that people are weighing up the decision based on some or all the above factors and coming to the conclusion that it’s just not fair to their families for them to stay in. A one year wait without flying pay may stop a few, (and i definitely think by the way that it is very unfair to the people who have put their lives on the line time and again for their country and just want a better life for themselves and their families - which the RAF is unable to provide) but I think that it will ultimately be a futile attempt to manage the symptoms whilst ignoring the cause.