If all that the Shar-bashers say is true, then why bother continuing for the next 3 years, training youngsters up on the beast and wasting money? Let's all give up the Dark Blue and sign out a set of nylon Janitor's overalls in dashing light blue and save the odd million here and there.
I think that i'd rather nail my privates to a passing car.
Flying the Jet still means something to a lot of people, and taking part in recent exercises makes you soon realise that reliance on Foreign assets is something that we want to avoid at all costs! Having seen the americans shoot each other down at the ACMI with all their Gucci interrogators and treat it like they do it all the time was one of the scariest things imaginable! It is a sad passing, I agree, and being part of the scramble that is the shocking organisation of a migration to a jet AD pilot's don't want to fly, makes you realise that there are people making decisions that generally rely on their political emphasis and have little grounding in reality.
Yes it's going. But we don't have to like it.