I've not had anything to do with ETPS for some years, but from the outside I'd say that they have a healthy future, but change is inevitable.
UAVs still need testing - and all of the TPS have by now introduced courses for UAV T&E people (I'm nervous of calling them TPs, in my mind they're closer to FTEs, but whatever you call them, they're needed, need training, and a TPS is an obvious place to train them).
ETPS, like at-least one other school (NTPS who I seem to keep bumping into around the world) and probably all of them, has started to deliver many short courses.
Cost drivers are an ongoing massive issue for everybody these days, and I suspect that they'll eventually admit that basic flight test techniques do not need teaching on a fast jet. A trivial change in theory, but one if it gets made will be done against massive resistance.
They probably also will also always have a UK role as a sort of "FT CFS" assisting other military test flying bodies in maintaining standards and best practice, although perhaps need as a body to engage with the rest of the test flying community more than at present to ensure that. At present you don't see a lot of ETPS working level people at SFTE/SETP/AGARD/RAeS/FTSW/etc. meetings to the extent you do from other equivalent organisations and that's in my opinion to the UK's detrement - they also publish very few technical papers around the bazaars (again compared to other equivalent organisations - I can't remember when I last saw a paper out of BDN in either Cockpit or Aeronautical Journal).
No, I don't think ETPS should be worried about being culled, it just also needs to avoid worrying too much about being forced to change and just roll with the blows.
G
Last edited by Genghis the Engineer; 19th September 2013 at 13:30.