Hi OAP,
I'll bite because I do like a good argument on a Sunday afternoon and I don't fancy engaging the wife in one!
1) it doesn't matter how many spares were kept on the shelves at BZN, the jet would have kept breaking down. Unless this happened on the waterfront at Brize, that would have led to delays, cancellations etc. True, with an unlimited and immediate supply of spares and a return of engineering numbers and experience to previous levels, the dispatch rate and availability at Brize would have been much better. But the jet would have still been untenably unreliable away from home base.
2) The enhancement and update project you refer to (MMR I presume) would not have helped mitigate against the above. How long were majors and minor *s taking to address corrosion issues towards the end?
3) The daily cost of the "hugely expensive" PFI is the roughly the same as the daily cost of running the VC10 and Trimotor fleets combined. True, the day to day numbers of aircraft are less ( assuming the surge fleet is not used) but as has been stated plenty of times before on this forum, the actual aircraft availability is more, the capability is guaranteed and so reliable that it can actually be used effectively. I guess you can either lose money as profit to AirTanker's shareholders or piddle it away as waste due due to arcane military management, either way if you want a reliable fleet of AT/AAR assets, it's going to cost. Profit or waste, it mostly ends up back in the treasury's coffers eventually anyway.
4) Apparently, the only reason that all 8 voyagers aren't permanently flying tasks and eliminating what is a genuinely expensive charter bill is a lack of RAF crews. Whose fault is that? Is it likey to improve over time? Read some of the other threads here and see what you think.
Arty.