Worst course ever?

[left one o clock]

What is the worst military course you have ever been on?

[John Farley]

Bit tricky that…

Worst weather, location, instructional staff, food, accommodation, totty, course notes, relevance of exams, etc etc?? Give us a clue. And don’t say ‘all of those’ because there is no such thing as bad totty during a course.

[charliegolf]

The GIT Course at Newton. gang of failed teachers with one quip- "We took the 3-year teacher training course and expanded it to 2 weeks".

Love to see them with a class of 5-year olds.


AR5 course at North Luff. Close second

[Pontius Navigator]

5 day Special Safety Course at Catterick squeezed into 4 weeks.

[Specaircrew]

The compulsary EO course, complete waste of time and money and an offense to any educated person.

[mbga9pgf]

Definately Marham golf course.

[SilsoeSid]

Sorry mbga9pgf, must be Port Stanley golf course.

View from the 6th!!

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ianafh/travel_pix/pict0001.jpg

[SirToppamHat]

A certain course that used to be held at Locking that taught us how to double-knot and lead-seal mail bags, open blister cabinets and issue and receive various pads and bits of paper and electronic 'guns'.

Crap accommodation, but what really sticks in my mind was the weather was awful, pretty much all the time. No MT (but it was only a 20 min walk from the Mess to the classroom). We'd all pitched up with Geltex(Sp?) jackets, only to be told on day one that these were banned because:

It was a basic training unit.
Therefore the troops had to march everywhere in squads.
It is impossible to march in Geltex(Sp?) jackets.
Therefore the troops shall not wear them.
Not fair for other staff to wear them.
Therefore Geltex(Sp?) jackets banned for all personnel, including visiting students.

Result was that we'd start most 'lessons' wet and miserable; they were boring enough as it was. Of course there was no mention of the ban in the Joining Instructions.

Great leadership, in some respects, but not helped when Stn Cdr passes by in the rain, nice and dry in his warm car. Of course, the airmen in trg were allowed to wear their flasher macs, so they were nice and dry at least!

[jindabyne]

charlie golf

GIT Course? The best thing that brought us out of blackboards! And I also recall that claim about 3-years teaching, which was true. Prepared me for greater things, colured non-permas, shaded viewfoils, and the rest. A good two-week booze-up where rank didn't matter. Were we on the same course - 22 Jan 68.

[BEagle]

An excrutiatingly boring 2-day course at Raytheon about TCAS and SIFF? The average aircrew instructor could have presented it in a couple of hours.....

But at least we got a night in an hotel on HM's rates!

No - on second thoughts Speccers has it right. That crap Equal Opportunities course was the worst!

[opso]

It has to be ISS! No teaching and your very first submission could get you thrown off the course. It would just be a very poor course if it weren't for the fact that your future promotion could be hanging in the balance. And it's a far, far longer waste of time than any EO course.

[jindabyne]

RAAF Staff College

Has to be - for a Brit.

Why would you want to travel half way round God's earth to be confronted with sun, syndicates with wine, days off for the likes of Melbun Cup, free educational trip round the island, and a bunch of fellow thugs who were able to drop out at 3 months notice to go do other civvy things, Worst course in the world - unless you happened to be on it!

[Always_broken_in_wilts]

IRT or IDT or what ever other in vogue title comes to mind.........practice bleeding or what:}

Latest observation was to have guys down simulating mine clearance.............................tail wags dog again:}

all spelling mistakes are "df" alcohol induced

[Melchett01]

ABIW - I have to disagree about IRT. Has given me the biggest laugh on any course in my service history.

Having been told to re-do it last year for the second time in 2 months because the identical course I did for ONW didn't qualify me for TELIC. However, one very understanding Rockape instructor, realising it was IRT take 2 skipped all the crap and went straight onto the mine awareness bit which was the only thing I hadn't done. And it was then that he asked the following unforgettable Blackadder question that had me rolling round the floor, much to his annoyance -

So then Sir, just what are the initial actions on encountering a mine?

:D :D :D

Well Cpl, do you mean jumping a hundred feet in the air and quickly spreading yourself over as wide an area as possible, or is there something else I should do???

Thought all my course Christmases had come at once.

Only completely bollocks course I was on, tempted to spare the course instructor's embarrassment here ........ nah ....... a course at the wonderful School of Fighter Control where 90% of the course failed an exam, the STDO was called in who said one student failing was acceptable as they were either thick, lazy or genuinely didn't understand. Fo 90% to fail was the fault of the instructors, the sign of a crap course or a problem with the exam.

At which point the instructors blamed the students for failing!!!! But it's SFC, so I suppose that explains everything:\ :\ :mad:

[ShyTorque]

256 degrees was my worst ever, during an IRT.

Should have been on 255 degrees.

;)

[HercFairy]

BEagle

You've had a TCAS SIFF course! mind telling me how it works?!:confused:

We've had it for 6 months now and still no sign of a course to tell me how to fix it!::ooh: ;)

[grusome]

jindabyne
Got a year for us, maaate?
Gru (79)

[jindabyne]

Gru

Twas 36 Course

[allan907]

Have to agree with Opso. ISS has it for me. 18 months of pressure and deadlines. Couple that with overstretch (yes, we did have it back in the 80's) and the normal demands of the job and you've got a recipe for disaster (as many a failed/recoursed student will testify). Mind you it was not a prerequisite for promotion in those days - we still had the "C" exam - and there's another story.

Having said that ISS was the worst course one did, of course, learn something from it which made the Basic Staff and subsequent staff courses slightly easier ('cos you got to know the mindset of the Directing Staff).

What annoyed me about BSC was the twee presentations of little models at the end of the course. I was on 99 BSC and suggested a pair of mannequin hands mounted on a plinth passing a pen from one hand to another. The caption was to read ...."99, change hands". Twas not accepted though as it was thought to be far too subversive. Prolly why I was only given B pass!

[JessTheDog]

Ab-initio training for a certain branch that shall not be named. Treated like small children. Failed the final exam. Got b@llocked by a rent-a-senior-officer. Found out there had been a b@lls-up between the exam paper and the marking script and we had in fact passed. Waited (in vain) for an apology. The epitome of all that is wrong in the service!

[Dan Winterland]

The Security Officer's course had me wishing I was back on the CSRO course. But at least they had just binned the end of course exam - as no-one gave a toss wether they passed or not!

[grusome]

jindabyne

Ah...You probably toured on one of "my" aircraft.

gru (33 Course and SQN)

[rej]

Not really wholly relevant on a pilot thread but the ATCIC (Air Traffic Control Instructors Course) has to be the most soul destroying course I've been on.

Weeks upon weeks of being told you were not reaching the standard required - not that the standard was ever stated and not that any ATC-specific teaching techniques (such as simulator instruction) were even taught to us, the ATCIC students. Two Week GIT course followed by egomaniacs from within your own branch grinding you down so much that when you passed the course you had no belief in you own ability to do the job let alone teach it to others.

[Cornish Jack]

Can well believe REJs assessment - especially given the utterly abyssmal standard of instruction on the basic JATC course.... on the simulator portion, that is. The initial 'ground school' was brilliant, the practical part using the real aircraft was no problem, but the sim instructors were the most appalling bunch of self-promoting wazzocks I ever had to endure in 35 years of Auntie Mary's Flying Club:yuk:
Perhaps my telling one of them that his 'teaching' methods were more suited to the 18th than the 20th century didn't improve my prospects:uhoh:
I suppose I should have been warned by the arrival brief which referred to the remnants of a previous course of which 90% (yes NINETY) had been 'chopped' and the assurance that our course would likely suffer a similar fate. I'm not sure what these people should have been doing, but ANY form of instruction should have been a no-no:mad:

[MrBernoulli]

Prior to deploying to Muscat for Saif Sareea II, and knowing that a little excursion into Afghanistan was very likely, we had to do some learning on:

1. Slit trench digging.
2. Erecting barbed wire fences (single, double and triple rolls!)
3. Using a hand-held compass (in case you had to call down fire in a certain direction .... or build your trench/fence in a certain direction.
4. Filling sand-bags and using same to build protective walls etc.

Having told us that sand-bag walls must be made with the 'footer' and 'header' layers of bags in a certain order I then questioned why their example wall was exactly the opposite of what they were stipulating. "Err, ..... you're not supposed to notice things like that Sir." Precisely - and thats why I'm not in the Regt - because stuff like that is obvious.

Next day a certain other Sqn were doing the same 'course'. After an hour of barbed wire OC of the Sqn said "Enough, my aircrew and I are not listening to this nonsense" and left! Such a shame. Regt chaps could have done with more banter about their sh1te sandbag wall.

[BEagle]

Whereas your OC wouldn't have had the spherical bits to say such a thing lest it might hinder his push for Air Rank......:yuk:

"Good brief, Flt Sgt, very useful....."

[NorthernSID]

CAC - Conduct after capture

Pure practice bleeding, almost literally

Having talked to the boys who spend some time with the Baath party in Bagdad in GW 1, whatever came your way was going to be FAR worse than could ever be handed out by the DS/Regiment/Army at St Mawgan

I'd have rather have had lectures. I can believe in extreme pain without having to experience it 'voluntarily'

[adrian mole]

Got to agree with you guys about the GIT Course. Two weeks of character assasination by so called experts. Funniest moments on my course were when a Nav teaching advanced maths took his lessons - there was always a fight to operate the video as he was the only one not liable to be questioned...

[Airbedane]

Officer training, although it did prepare me for the worst of things to come in the future.

I hated every second of it - it was only the sight of the JP's flying round the Cranwell circuit that got me through to the flying phase of the course.

And yes, Beagle, I know I was a GE and missed out on the rest of the cr@p that you had to put up with, but it was still my worst course!

At the other end of the scale, the French TP course had to be the best. Whenever things got difficult, we used to take lunch.....and after that, who cared anyway.

A

[The Gorilla]

For me it has just got to be the AAITC when it was run at Finningley by Aircrew Ego's!!

Having been a groundcrew Sgt for 2 years and remustering to the rank of plastic Sgt, it has to be said that very few Officer Aircrew from the NCO Aircrew world as was, had any idea about leadership!!

The course was designed by bullies and run by bullies. Most of the useful stuff was a direct takeoff from GST 2 at Hereford and the slides still had the GST 2 Logos on them. The rest of the course was merely designed to destroy your confidence and humiliate you, physically and mentally and they wouldn't get away with it today.

They even had the cheek to try and fail an ex groundcrew Sgt because his leadership qualities weren't up to the grade of Plastique, oh really! That issue was resolved by AOC/Air Sec intervention in double quick time!!


It was a good day when Finningley shut and the AATS was closed to become NAAS at Cranwell. The Regiment have taken over and the AAITC is run properly. One of the many times I have been grateful to the Navigator branch!!

:ok:

[teeteringhead]

And so well informed too chutley .

I remember when I did the equal opps course, I asked about transsexuals to be put down with a:

"The RAF doesn't have any!"

"Funny", I replied, "there are 2 on my present Station!":confused:

[Pontius Navigator]

NorthernSid, quite right. All the CAC course does is make you want to win the Evade bit and avoid the Escape bit. Only lesson you're going to remember is the pain.

Now the class training on the sqn, when as V-force we were far to precious to damage, was much better. The USAAC film in the Italian camp, the captain having a cigarette and the men being treated like SH1T was a good one. Only last year I saw the original model for that film, a French WW1 based movie. There was a raport between the aristicratic Hun and the noble Frenchman with everyone else being treated as boot dirt.

Then there was the Korean war film. Again excellent with a side bet of who was who in the actors - famous faces in unfamiliar roles.

[BEagle]

Airbedane wrote (about Officer Training): "I hated every second of it - it was only the sight of the JP's flying round the Cranwell circuit that got me through to the flying phase of the course.

And yes, Beagle, I know I was a GE and missed out on the rest of the cr@p that you had to put up with, but it was still my worst course!"

Yes, the motivating effect of the JPs flying around RAFC was indeed highly valuable and I'm sure that many cadets or student officers going round the Knocker course or building pine pole A-frames in Bristol Woods would agree that it was only the thought of "Mates did years in the bag in WW2 - all I've got to do is to put up with this utter horse$hit for a bit longer and it'll be me up there looking down on all this sort of cr@p in a few months' time!"

Actually, time as a Flt Cdt wasn't that bad, really. Although I only did a year before escaping to University, you were treated like an Officer cadet, not some grunt recruit. The OT Sqn Cdrs and Flt Cdrs all had to have been cadets themselves, we had some excellent educational training and some reasonable trips (such as a week playing with the Army in BFG) - OK, there was drill, PT, and lots of marching about to do, but on the whole it was a pretty damn good course. The old Flt Cdt system which took people from spotty 17 year old schoolkid to Pilot Officer with RAF wings in 2 1/2 years was a very good system indeed. Much as we loathed polishing curtain rails (thank you, 94 Entry...) and sweeping the Cadets' garage on Saturday mornings, the knowledge that next year you'd be up in one of those JPs really kept you going.

Removing BFT (and I mean that, not that stupid BFJT acronym) from Cranwell was one of the biggest crimes that has ever been perpetrated. Even though it was only in the Spicano.

Worst course by far? 237 OCU in the late 1970s...........
Best course by far? No 1 course at 'New Chivenor'!! Heaven truly was in Devon!!

[jindabyne]

Off thread a little, but ---

Best course, 229 OCU Chivenor (Hunter); followed by 237 OCU (Buccaneer).