MPN11 (YOUR #262),
...Danny42C ... I beg to differ with your #256 perspective on WRAF ATCOs amortising their training costs. It may have been true in the past...
Sir, I defer to your much greater knowledge of this. But I can "only speak as I found" about my last few years at Leeming before retirement in 1972.
In that time we had only a small handful of new WRAF Controllers, all good-lookers in the full bloom of their youth. As an AFS, each was outnumbered 50 to 1 by normal, fit and healthy young bachelors living in the same Mess, roughly of the same age as themselves: having survived OASB these would have been "above average" in comparison with the locals with whom they had previously been acquainted.
Well, it just
had to happen (didn't it ?) - "you can't stop the sun from shining !"
It may well have been that in later years some would decide to make the RAF a full career, and be very successful. Indeed, had I decided to take up the option (thank God I didn't) to extend to 55, in my next posting I might have greeted my new SATCO with an Elizabethan flourish and a "Good Morning, Ma'am ! (having had the same kind of shock which the sight of my first Sqn Ldr without ribbons below his wings gave me in the early '50s).
Made me realise I was one of "Yesterday's Men" - and my time was up !
Danny.