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Raf"s Jolly To Alps Is Snow Joke
This is a disgrace. You would have thought in this day and age you could waste more than £250k on a trip :ok:
News RAF"S JOLLY TO ALPS IS SNOW JOKE EXCLUSIVE by GARY JONES 228 words 11 January 2005 Mirror 11 English (c) 2005 Mirror Group Ltd THE RAF spent £250,000 of taxpayers" money on a 23-day training exercise in Switzerland so pilots could fly in the right type of snow. But the pre-Christmas trip caused a storm at the Ministry of Defence when aircrews described it as the trip of a lifetime. It emerged the 40- strong group of men and women would finish flying early so they could go skiing, sightseeing and to nightclubs. No33 squadron, based at RAF Benson, Oxon, also enjoyed five-star hospitality at the Swiss air base at Sion near the holiday resort of Montreux and were paid more for being overseas. A senior Ministry of Defence source said: "Diversions were found. The Swiss were great hosts." RAF chief Sir Jock Stirrup learned of the "jolly" when the Puma helicopter squads boasted about it to colleagues and pictures of the trip appeared in the service"s paper the RAF News. The source added: "Sir Jock is furious. The excuse about the type of snow didn"t go down well. "The RAF has been hit with nearly 10,000 job cuts so hearing about an expensive fun break in Switzerland didn"t help at all." A RAF spokesman said: "This training needs altitudes above 5,000ft and can"t be done in the UK." Document DMIRR00020050111e11b0002v [IMG]Daily Mirror[/IMG] |
Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.
Hang your heads in shame |
I hated every minute of a two week trip to Florida in the summer of 19XX - the worst bits were the evenings, being surrounded by fit girls queuing up to meet these even fitter Brit guys with their nice accents ....
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This is getting a little hysterical.....so let's dispel a few myths. Have you ever stayed on an air base where you were given "5-star hospitality"? Well looked after - as befits an exchange of this sort - but "5-star?" Not many have, I would suggest
Yes, they were paid more for being overseas - it's called LSSA, and most of the boys and girls on the Sqn will have spent a large porportion of recent yeras overseas on one cr@ppy det or another. If they were acommodated in hotels, yes, there is subsistence allowance etc, but you can bet that this would be one of the few dets of this year where this would apply. And do you really think that OC 33 can merrily take his Sqn on an exercise in another nation without permission from the highly-paid help? The FJ boys get (increasingly rarely, I know) Red Flag, Maple Flag and so on to train in appropriate conditions against a simlulated threat - why the hysteria because 33 Sqn got to Switzerland to train at high altitude? (probably as part of a multi-national effort?) I'm rather disgusted at you, Mike, for replying in such a fashion to such an obviously sensationalist report without apparent regard to the background or circumstances. SBG |
Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. It emerged the 40- strong group of men and women would finish flying early so they could go skiing, sightseeing and to nightclubs. Ski-ing = Adventurous training and physical fitness. Sightseeing = Personal development. Nightclubbing = that or sit in a barrack block on a Swiss base and read the Aircrew / Technical manual. I would hazard a guess that their swiss hosts organised most events, and lets face it, the whole det would have to be authorised and funded by Group, not the Sqn itself. At best the boys and girls would have had their ski passes subsidised (as is only right and fair as it is recognised in the Services that physical fitness is part of the basic military skill-set). The "tax-payer" would certainly not have funded the visits to any nightclubs. Hang our heads in shame? Not a chance, hold our heads up high for using yet another detachment to actually introduce some element of fun back into service life. Well done 33 Sqn, bet you it was a lot nicer than Bosnia / Iraq / Afghanistan / insert country of your choice here! |
£250,000 for 40 people for 23 days........ Absolutely outrageous. What on earth were you doing? It appears that you were staying in the 5 star barracks reading the ACM when you should have been nightclubbing.
Seriously though, surely the cost of the detacjhment would be more than that.... they must have the figures wrong. If not then it was cheap as chips. Sir Jock is furious he didn't get an invite. Try harder chaps. as for 5-star barracks. Try the Noggy Naval barracks at Bergen - First class. |
Perhaps I may have been the only one to read Mikehegland's post as the ironic and humourous post it was presumably meant to be?
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Hurrumph!
Bounders one and all - God forbid any one combining a detachment and a bit of fun in this day and age!. If the flying is to be meaningful training one should be living in overcrowded tents on a noisy airfield in appauling conditions with the prospect of a decent bit of "incoming". The very thought of being resonably comfortable, well fed, rested and therefore receptive to learning a bit / improving ones skills is discraceful. Don't even get me going on them being allowed out of the tent in the afternoons to actually enjoy life once in a while. They'll be allowing marriage before the second tour and "singlies" to live outide the Mess next :yuk: |
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Mike, Allan, fair enough, I bit didn't I? Obviously overworked, need to go on detachment and have a rest............. retreating back below the parapet now. |
As a former scribbly I share Mike's outrage and disgust at this profligacy with the taxpayer's money.
For £250K one could have funded Investors in Paperwork for maybe even 2 weeks, or, or paid the MOD's 'Consultants' bill for 1/2 a day, or, or paid the compensation & legal bill for a whole day! I dare say one could even have funded one day's worth of the BWoS "Fleece-Factor". Jeez! one could even have bought 250 super-duper swivel chairs! |
One could ask why they don't come here (BDF) and freze their @rse off with their collauges, after all Navy, RAF and I belive AAC have/ is going to have quite a few crews up here this winter. You know, like clockwork.....
Ahhh........but it's in the middle of nowhere! That's why!!!!! :} :} :} (To be serious, not high enough mountains perhaps? ) |
For gawds sake no one tell em about Red Flag and Vegas!!
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Legitimate flying training for a Sqn capable of short notice operational deployments worldwide, combined with personal development and not to mention benefits of working with the Swiss forces.
If you want to save wasted money from which this country gets nothing in return, withdraw from Brussels and sack European Commissioners! |
Hear Hear Slider!!
If you want to save the wasted millions DO NOT vote them stupid Labour to$$ers back in. Vote Blue and give Howard a chance and Letwin with his promises of tax cuts!! |
I would love to have a face to face chat with this £%$£^* of a journalist. Its typical of irresponsible journalism that seems to be the norm these days. He obviously does not realise that 250k is NOTHING for a 23 day exercise. The skills learned on this det would be useful in the UK (snow, mountains, emergencies) Iraq (high density altitudes, emergencies) Afghanistan (High density altitude, mountains and kin big ones at that, emergencies) Kosovo/Bosnia ( snow, mountains, emergencies, high DA in summer) insert any country you like here. I would love to get these journalists up at night in the mountains and doing some snow landings then laugh when they find out adrenaline is brown. If any are reading this WE ARE NOT SUPERMEN JUST TRAIN HARD. The phrase train hard fight easy comes to mind.
Just out of curiosity i wonder where matey boy who works for the mirror stays when he is out and about round the country. Youth hostels with no food all night or 5 star hotel with more than the usual small amount we get to feed us for a day. Maybe we could put him up in the 5 star accomodation we stay in :) Just an aside i know a lot of the guys who were on this det and they did get a LOT of benefit from it. A big proportion of the guys had not done any real mountain flying for years, if at all. |
On a serious note...
...the damage is now done in terms of the adverse publicity generated by that low-life rag and its 'reporters'. This cr@p will have been read and believed by a huge number of people. What can be done by way of repair? Make a start - don't buy the trash. Good grief....:mad: |
Why is it irresponsible journalism? If I paid UK taxes I'd want to know that my money was being well spent and correctly administered and not wasted on a made up jolly like this was. I really cannot believe that the Sqdn Boss thought he could get away with this. 20 Years ago maybe they could have but in today's finacial climate it is totally and utterly stupid to think you can get away with this.
If you want to send the Squadron skiing then do it legally and properly and not through some back door exercise established to squander the public purse. Please don't try and justify it by saying it was good for exercise or to increase levels of fitness...you can do that by going for a run around the block. Don't make excuses for them by saying it was team building....again, easy to organise in the UK for less than £250,000. Do they need to go to Switzerland to practice mountain flying...How many other squadrons / Units go to Switzerland to practice Mountain flying ? They should be made to pay the money back. Shame on them. Its no wonder the rest of the Armed Forces are short of Kit and equipment when this is going on. |
Why weren't the shortly to be saying, 'Do you want fries with that?' Squadron not using the JHC EETU, established in Northern Norway specifically for this purpose?
To claim this was anything but a jolly will only rile the press and public more. But so what, look at the junkets our lords and masters go on and MOD duty travel rate is 25 p per mile. If you are an MP you get 65p per mile, a positive incentive to drive as much as possible. Do the kipper fleet still do a round the world on the OCU? Is this still deemed necessary? |
Read where it originated......MIRROR GROUP!!!
If it's in the paper, then it must all be true!!........NOT Lighten up guys and gals. As a British taxpayer I dont resent these type of excercises. There should be more of them!! As a British Taxpayer who paid for all my jollies in MOD aircraft overthe years...I did. And I bloody well enjoyed it... |
The kipper fleet OCU take an aircraft and its crew to places that they will be expected to operate from once there course is complete, and no its not "round the world"
Sure they have a good time when there off, what do you want them to do? Sit in and read an aircrew manual? But they work darn hard in the air... period. |
Firstly, I don't know why CAS is miffed as it would have not even come out of his budget - 33 Sqn work for JHC who get their budget from Land Command i.e. the Army!
Secondly if they took the opportunity to do some adventurous training then that sound like efficient use of time and resources. (I am not going into the justification for adventurous trg here.) Thirdly where can you find real mountains in the UK that compare to those on the continent? Where can you guarantee the snow? M609 I think you'll find that BDU is full for the winter trg period as far as JHC is concerned. GB2 |
Why are we seemingly always having to justify what we are doing in the name of training? Our 1st and 2nd RO's are not going to take the risk of letting us worker bees "enjoy" ourselves at the taxpayers expense if our training isn't "proper" training but heh if we do enjoy ourselves should we feel guilty?
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I think Mikehegland is a journo looking for a reaction to get a story.
Or maybe he really is a pilot, just constantly throwing out lines for us to bite on... Either way he comes across as an arrogant, ignorant civvie with the opinionated drivel he posts |
I know you have to get the snow (available in loads of other places cheaper than switzerland), but isnt 250 grand a bit much, if it is an accurate figure?
Thats about 5 times a Naval Air Squadron's annual T & S budget ffs!!:{ |
How much of that £250k would have been spent anyway? It works out at about 2 Puma flying hours per day for the period, at a reasonable guesstimate or £6k/hour, which sounds like a reasonable training rate to me. Accommodation provided by the Swiss, so free or at least cheap, fuel, engineering etc would have been paid for anyway, and they won't have been on LSSA as, IIRC, you need to do more than 30 days for that.
So what's actually happened is that 33 have used some of their annual allocation of training hours - which, yes, are expensive - to do quality training, and had fun in between. How can any sane person have a problem with that? BCH |
I am disgusted!
They could have gone on that other alcohol fuelled jolly, the annual RAF Ski Championships, with a small personal contribution..... Personally speaking, when I was overseas on Her Majesty's business, I took my own small tent with me. I would pitch it outside the hotel (normally only 4 star alas) and send all my unspent rates back to the Ministry of Defence with instructions to Mr Hoon to spend it as he saw fit, especially if it assisted in some way with our administration or gathering knowledge from first-class consultants! Even better, the £250K could have been spent on air transport for our own Dear Leader and the First Family. Perhaps there is urgent business in the Caribbean that needs discussion? Read where it originated......MIRROR GROUP!!! Firstly, I don\'t know why CAS is miffed as it would have not even come out of his budget - 33 Sqn work for JHC who get their budget from Land Command i.e. the Army! |
Thats about 5 times a Naval Air Squadron's annual T & S budget ffs!! |
There is no way that £250K T&S would be incurred! My estimate is that the T&S maximum would have been around 10% of the total, around £25K. This is still a mere 50% of the T&S budget I ran in my last job! Still, it's at the end of the FY and if you don't spend it, you get less next year.
Also, this would have been authorised, by delegated authority, all the way up to the (ignomiously entitled) bottom-level budget holder - ie the CO. It probably featured in a budget plan submitted in late 03/04 - or at least the funds for some sort of exercise were authorised! The whole MOD budget setup is b@lls in any case, and bears little resemblence to how funds are actually spent. Finally, I was not an adminner or budgeteer and never have been, except when it has raised its head as an associated or secondary duty.:\ |
Why are you insisting on defending this appalling waste of money.
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What's the fuss all about? Such dets have happened in the past. I'm sure the older, (wiser?) blokes reading this thread will recall with fondness "Luckies" in Oberamagau. And the long back garden. :hmm: :rolleyes:
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mikehegland, im going to lay the gauntlet down, you obviously dont know the slightest little thing about Military aviation. So what is your background?
Get it onto the open rather that hiding behind posts that dont reveal anything about you. |
Mike - Are you really that much of an oxygen thief? Just a question
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If you really truthfully can justify a trip to Switzerland to go mountain flying then go Mountain flying.
If you really truthfully can justify a trip to Switzerland to go skiing then go skiing. BUT....Don't attempt top Justify a skiing holiday to switzerland for 40 people for 23 days on the back of a feeble excuse like mountain flying. |
I just wish we had that much cash in our coffers and some spare time to enjoy it!
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You not playing mikehegland? What is your background then?????
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I think there is a troll infestation! I can't resist responding to some of the posts, but without the normal sense of outrage one feels towards a true adversary.
Aahh, Oberammergau...has anyone actually timed it so they see the Passion Play, rather than merely enjoying the Zugspitz, the Garmisch PX and Munich on the lash?!? I had a great jolly in Athens not so long ago, p!ssed all week, ferried out to an officers' club resort on the coast, got more p!ssed, danced (in a Zorba the Greek convoluted manner) with the Greek chief of air force staff...didn't put my hand in my pocket, took lots of rates back home, the hospitality book still gathered dust in the office. :E Any more fine jollies...sorry, frugal dispensation of taxpayers' monies?!? |
Mike,
This sort of environmental training is a good way to spend taxpayers money by maintaining a credible capability to enable us to fight in the winter in places like Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia for example. Wasn't is a recommendation of the Kosovo Puma Fatal Crash BOI that crashed in whiteout conditions high in the mountains that we continue to train in such environments to avoid such happenings in the future? So, capability aside, if you take a very financial view its spending money wisely to save money to avoid replacing expensive aircrew and machines! ZIC |
Thats all very well but what you are failing to understand is that it is Joe Public that you need to persuade...and he reads the Daily Mirror where he reads articles about the RAF spending £250k on a skiing trip and then he reads the Current Bun where he reads a story about the OC of a squadron having an affair with one of his Officers....
Great PR machine the AF have. and so what does Joe Public think of that lot then. For a start his idea of an AF Officer is someone with slicked back hair, a handlebar tache and who constantly spills his Pimms whilst shouting Hoooorah !... Thats what Joe thinks the AF is like...and reading his daily rag does nothing to persuade him otherwise. And, so what does the great PR machine do (whilst bleating that the AF is so short of money we are forcing to make redundancies) we send a squadron on a skiing holiday....Great,. Thats done the trick then. Joe and his mates will think we are all great now then. And rermember, it is Joe who pays our wages and in particular it is Joe who votes. |
Great PR machine the AF have. Of course, we'll next be getting stories about time in the desert spent building sandcastles, sight-seeing trips over Baghdad and the like. What exactly would you and the Mirror have us do with our time and resources?? Just sit there doing cock-all until the moment they might actually be needed, by which time, skill-fade has set in so deep that nobody has a clue how to do their job any more, so they may as well wing it - "after all Carruthers, it would be a jolly bad show if we didn't at least give it a bash what what! Never be able to show my face in the Mess again to order another Pimms if I let the Sqn down". And then having tried to wing it, they plough into the side of a mountain. And there's another headline for the Mirror - this time about how we can't do our job because we don't have the training to do it properly. But if it's in the Mirror it must be true. I just think that we could improve morale a bit more by buying proper toilet paper. As for Sir Jock being annoyed ...... of course - he's a choirboy isn't he. Never did anything like that in his day ..... hmmm If you want to talk about value for money - £250K for 40 people for 23 days works out at under £300 per person (yes I know it's a crude average that doesn't take into account various other factors), but bloody hell, show me where else you could get that same amount of training for so many people at such a low cost per person? And if they get to have a bit of fun thrown into the bargain after all the crap they've had thrown at them over the past years - the sh*t dets, the cutbacks, the bad management from their airships, the fact that when they go home their families don't recognise them because it's been that long since they were home - then so be it. If you think that a some decent training that also happens to be enjoyable isn't warranted after that lot, then you come and have a go at the job ....... assuming you're not a complete pussy or are you just one of the wheezy old fat boys sitting on the sidelines with a note from matron, happy to critisize but won't get of your arse to help. And no that's not a bite - that's me taking a bloody great chunk out! |
Mike,
Bravo - excellent fishing, old boy. Sorry to spoil your fun but PLEASE stop casting. To see so many people 'biting' has made my sides hurt - seriously, I haven't laughed so much in ages! Come on the rest of you, chill out, this chap is not really being serious! However, I just worry someone will say something they will regret. Or, God forbid, tell the truth about how hard detachments and exercises really are! |
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