Much as this debate is interesting it would be naive in the extreme to think any of it new or innovative.
Any diehard of a maritime scruffs bar will have all of this a thousand times before, putting the world to rights over a post flight bevvy.
Leading hands/corporals as sensor operators...versus all officer crews. Constituted crews or a pool of aircrew. Cross trained operators (something we had in the past and stopped doing). And so on.
It's worth remembering that we used to be pretty good at this stuff, back in the good ol cold war days. It's also worth remembering that technology never quite lives up to marketing hype (and in the case of a few bits of expensive kit we all know and "love", never came close!). What starts out to deskill the job, somehow usually ends up making twice as hard with a commensurate increase in the training burden.
I'm all for progress and, in fact, I was always vocal in my criticism of the amount of technical bumf we expected operators to hoist on board, purely, IMHO, for the purposes of competitive catergorisation. Now would be a good time to lighten up and streamline the training requirements of some aircrew elements, but cautiously I would counsel. There are a lot of skills that we will need to reacquire and we cannot afford to sidestep any of the crucial ones.
As for non-constituted crews...a lot of us will have flown with non-constituted foreign MPA crews during ops and exercises. Fundamentally, they sucked.
Last edited by The Old Fat One; 22nd Jul 2015 at 03:08.