Should I sacrifice my braces to attempt to become a pilot in the RAF?
Muppet.
Please allow me to address a small snippet of misinformation in your post. You suggest that 18 year old DEs have poorer promotion prospects. This is not quite true. You will of course soak up 6 years of initially poor wages (a good thing in the eyes of the bean counters) but your overall promotion chances are potentially better, not worse. Once you get to the stage that Sqn Ldr is a possibility you will be comparably younger than the graduates and therefore a brighter prospect for high command later on. This does obviously depend on your own maturity etc but the RAF gets slightly more than a pound of flesh with regards to RoS from younger guys and that is good in their eyes. Just in case you think I'm bigging myself up it is quite the opposite. I was a graduate DE after a four year degree. I was CR on the Jaguar at 28.5 years old. By the time I was considered to be in the promotion bracket I was 34 (it's lucky that promotion was never my bag). Our young friend Jacko and his ilk would be around 30 and therefore a brighter long term prospect than the likes of me. If you don't believe me I can cite many examples.
BV