It is always hard to tell when you get an interesting question if it is just an excuse for some easy banter of if it is a serious one... so I'll take it as a serious one just in case...
Question 1 : I believe you can find part of the answer right at home : when the FAA FJ were absorbed by the RAF so was gone the embarked aviation in the UK (I'm talking fixed wing here). Surely everybody has his own opinion, but I believe it comes down to a couple of simple things (other than politics) :
- crabs don't join to spend 6 to 8 months per year at sea or away otherwise they would have joined the Navy. As easy as that. As a matter of fact I remember when Invincible used to participate in the all the Gulf big air exercises, the ship would go there empty, stovies would join in Oman, get onboard a couple of weeks for the exercise and then disembark before the ship went back home empty...
- it does indeed take a lot of time to keep up with the skills involved with a cats 'n' traps aviation. Unfortunately, the nation that invented it all is about to rediscover how hard it is as soon as the QE2 is afloat. What a shame. I would say that all highly technical skills are hard to maintain, however some more than others...Flying is difficult, flying from the sea is even more difficult. Otherwise anybody would have carriers. Chinese are getting one, let's see how long they take to master the skills to operate it.
When the french carrier went into refit it took A LOT of effort to keep everybody (pilots, LSO, yellow dogs, etc...) current. And that was "just" an 18 months refit...
Question 2 : Yes it is more expensive, yes it is safer. Although I am no specialist (being rotary, I try to keep as far as I can from flat tops), so I don't know exactly how long it takes to form a LSO (3 years seems a bit short to me, you have to add some 10 years of flying experience) As an example, our LSO are captains, that is how rare they are.
Question 3 : No, our crabs don't want to go at sea (as stated before), yes they want all the rafales, and the choppers, and the satellites, and the UAVs, but that's politics. There are pilot exchanges between AA and the Aéronavale, so becoming proficient on a deck is no impossible task. The main problem is keeping current (specially for night deck ops, although from what I know it got much easier with the new jets). So I believe it is a matter of either or, you can't do both.
Can you be more specific on what do you mean by C2 and modus operandi? I'll try to answer on a different post otherwise this one is going to get really boring
