Originally Posted by Ken Scott
There is also a lack of QFIs at OCU level on the ME fleets because the UASs, which traditionally were where ME QFIs were trained, are now manned mostly by a (small) number of FTRS instructors. This will only get worse once MFTS comes in.
Indeed, the RAF's traditional QFI nursery is now full of reservists and civvies; we always said this would cause a problem, but who listened?
As for SDSR, no, of course is wasn't the only issue, but it was probably the final straw. Before that, the training system also suffered from various reorganisations that failed to streamline the pipeline. Things became steadily worse as we went from BFTS(s) + AFTS + TWU(s) to Mirror Image to Valley, with some EFTS stuff thrown in. Every change seemed to live up to expectations by progressively degrading a formerly working system.
By around 2005, the PTC guys were working flat out just to keep things moving, but struggling even to break even. Contractorized eng support at Valley was good enough, but lacked the flexibility to allow them to catch up. So things just steadily got worse. They even tried reducing the syllabi, but that just transferred risk to the OCUs (and eventually to the front line) where we could least afford it. The Harrier guys were having serious IPS issues, which were then compounded when the big push came to build up the Typhoon Force; the later delays in that programme meant that the Typhoon OCU had to have the pick of the crop because just one student lost at OCU would have caused the planned stand-up to fail. Politics could not allow that to happen, apparently.