I'm afraid I may not have been as clear as I'd hoped. I didn't say Ops normal Jan/Feb. Jan/Feb is when most of us think we are going to be ready to start thinking about getting instructors and pilots back into the air and, if we get the same dog-toffee winter we had this year, we won't be getting much done even then.
I actually said Oct 15. Even OC 2FTS's own assessment puts us into the latter half of 2015 before all 25 Sqns are carrying out the full range of activities (GIC/GS/AGT etc.) again. I'm just adding a couple of months on as a bit of a fudge factor, bearing in mind that most of the dates we've been given seemed to have slipped to the right over the past few months, so I don't think its a completely unreasonable assumption, I hope you'll agree.
Bear in mind that they've only just finished inspecting the 5 Vigilant and 5 Viking airframes to finish establishing the scale of the problems involved in returning the fleets to an airworthy state. So Syerston will just now be getting some sort of picture of how long it will take to get things back in order. Bear in mind, as they troll through the fleet, there's a fairly good chance that other unforeseen problems will spring up, and let's not forget the giant engineering backlogs at Syerston that existed even before all this blew up. (Even before this saga, there was a giant queue to get airframes into the rather temperamental GRP bay, which appears to be to engineering what Abu Hamza is to proctology.)
From the latest update I've seen (which, as ever, was annoyingly devoid of real detail, given that at some point OC 2FTS is presumably going to ask us unpaid volunteers to get back in these things and train people's kids) they're still optimistic that they can get flying underway at Syerston by October, but the big problem is bringing squadrons back up to speed. Even if the engineering goes to plan, the unofficial numbers I've heard thrown about crewrooms involves 1hr of SCT for every month off to regain proficiency- and we only usually operate two days a week. Then you have to throw in all the standardisation checks, category renewals and, in all probability, training everyone on a completely new set of engineering processes, procedures and standards. It's going to take a while. I just hope not too many more people are going to vote with their feet.