I fear iRaven is sending us off on a tangent with an all-too-familiar chorus that all CFAVs have heard before and just reinforces the idea that those in the RAF just have no real clue about what CFAVs do any more than CFAVs know what the RAF does. (To be honest, you probably know a lot less about us than we know about you.) It's facile, it's tiresome and it makes me want to push peoples' teeth so far down their throat that they'd need to floss with bog roll. Moreover, it's an irrelevance as far as this situation is concerned.
The VGS experience for staff is unique to the ACO. Most VR(T) officers get dressed up in a blue suit for 4hrs and probably work a handful of hours more each week. AEFs have an FTRS Flt Lt OC and enjoy all the support given by the full-time staff of the UAS with which they co-locate.
If you're on a VGS, even as a relatively junior member of staff, you can reasonably expect to have 25-30hrs of your week taken up by VGS ops, admin and general niff-naff and trivia. If you're the boss or an adj (now a non-flying post because of the weight of paperwork coming down the chute), that number is going to be far higher. You will have ZERO full-time staff on your unit to support you, so you can expect to be making and fielding phone calls at your place of employment, to which you have to keep going because the ACO doesn't pay you for the hours you put in. As instructors, we can't palm off any admin/eng/mt/supply/h&s problem to a "bluntie" because there are none. It's up to you to fix a problem or it stays broken. Having spent some time with our cousins at the local AEF, I can guarantee you won't find AEF pilots still at their desks going through paperwork at 2100-2200hrs on a Saturday or Sunday night. Why would they? They have what we'd love to have: a true fly and f***-off approach. Accordingly, they have a lack of drive and initiative to try and find alternative solutions to address their own problems which has, quite frankly, stunned me.
I took nearly 15 years out from the VGS system before coming back a couple of years ago. Although I rejoined the same sqn, the ethos was completely different and everyone there is doing their level best to comply with the new regulations. (Incidentally, it must be remembered that this current "pause" has nothing to do with any mistakes the volunteers have been making- this is the train set belonging to the "professionals".) Those who are struggling to adapt to the new culture are those who have been around the block a few times and have grown up with the can-do/make-do attitude brought about by inadequate RAF support, which has forced them to search for local solutions to problems. They are becoming fewer in number and the day of the well-meaning duffer has thankfully gone.
Let's take Leon's vignette about flying coveralls for one example of poor support. In the mid 90s, I was the inventory holder for a VGS, stuck with about 4 ma-husive boxes of growbags I wanted to get off my inventory. I couldn't return them because they hadn't been conditioned by a squipper- because we had no squipper on our parenting statement. Cut to nearly 20 years later and TGOs have finally decreed that VGS aircrew should carry an aircrew cutter. We're still not carrying them because- we STILL don't have squippers on our parenting statement. That's a fairly mundane example, but you can look at nearly any aspect of running a squadron and find jams caused not by us on the squadron staff, but by the supposed professionals who are tasked with supporting us. This applies to engineering (this current cock-up, not to mention the laughable backlog of aircraft at the Syerston GRP bay); MT; admin; supply and the list goes on. Don't even get me started on the spinning bow-tie extravaganza that is RAF Medical Services and the bizarre set of rules we have been given by them for cadet flying.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for making us a more professional outfit that works in a manner much more like the RAF, but our time, our talents and our resources are limited. Unless we get adequate support from the RAF, we will fail to achieve the targets and objectives set for us. If the RAF is not going to support us, then go ahead and shut us down because, with this extended pause in flying, a lot of us (not to mention our families) are starting to remember how much fun it is to have free time.