I'd like to know what the MoD formally thinks flying pay is for. One interpretation is that it's for specialist skills; as a pilot, I have a set of skills, learned and honed over year and years of flying, that with the best will in the world an admin officer doesn't have. These skills are in demand in other areas where they'd attract a certain salary, so I'm paid a bit more because of them.
I'm sure the MoD though, say it's for "recruitment and retention." Recruitment because it means after 10+ years of military flying I'm not as heavily disadvantaged versus 10+ years of civilian flying as I might have been, so military flying still seems like a viable option. Retention because as soon as you crack 2000 hours and that ATPL become a valuable asset, you're not immediately guaranteeing a 300% pay rise to leap to the civil sector, and there's a chance you might prefer to stay where you are.
However, the 2 options don't seem to work when you look at when the MoD will take it away. If it's retention pay, and you give me an awful ground job that I don't want to do, and yet I still stay in, you've retained me. My skills are still there, ready for the MoD to deploy to whatever role they see fit whenever they like. So why do I get a 50% cut followed by a 100% cut after a couple of years?
If it's for specialist skills and I PVR, if you expect me to provide those specialist skills for another year, why do I get a 100% cut?
Last edited by 5 Forward 6 Back; 9th Jun 2012 at 15:48.