Merely targets of opportunity!

I remember about 12 or 13 years ago, still SH at that time, filling in all those CRM forms and taking part in some of those very amusing debates etc and wondering what it was really all about...............it's all becoming so very clear now and thankfully times have changed :rolleyes:

Is this a training ground?
 

I was an Ascoteer when the RAF's Hercules were 'Made in Britain.'

It sounds as if you Áscoteers'are using the RAF's time as training to become 'Freight dogs' in real life. Then you will learn to tell of places you have visited by their 3 or 4 letter codes. Place names are so ordinaire.

AIDU
re your post#76
I had a colleague who used the pub visit as the means to overcome his jet lag upon return from Germany.

Stay safe guys, even the jealous wish I could drag SLF and boxes around the sky.

What Ho Plastic, I guess Im just too sensitive. Not like you to be ageist?

One egg or two? :O

On the subject of American breakfasts, I could never work out the egg cooking regime, so ordered scrambled every time. And how can they be home fries when they are not cooked at home??

You are definately an ascoteer once you have wrecked at least one hire car. (Mike Jenvey qualifies)

When you have made the walk back from Limassol to BB100 - 102 and you have been allocated every room in said blocks.
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BTW, not me as I got the bus full of cyp workers just past the main gate. Lost the chance on the bragging rights, but was really happy for the ride !

He ended up with an ass like a wizards sleeve, but thats another story!

Naaahh, that's Beagle after taking a cuppa from one of his loadie fans :ooh::ooh:

LOL.....:}

What will we do with all those chopped from FJ/Rotary? I suppose Ops Support will always need people to sharpen pencils.


MGD

You really need to have a good look at yourself mate!!! If you need your pencil sharpening come and visit our section and let me enlighten you.

A**E

You know you are an Ascoteer when you:

Have been gobsmacked at the numbers of returning soldiers on your TriStar seriously hurt during an exercise, thereby totally validating your decision to wear light blue.

Have quaranteened an aircraft for 2 days because of the Pterodactyl-sized bugs flying around inside after the pallets were left outside in Nairobi overnight (subsequently photocopying the blighters onto the jobcard as proof!!!).

Got bored of too many breakfasts in rotating restaurants.

Knew all the remote control combinations to make the pay-per-view channels in your swish hotel room free.

But it's not just the Loadies who nick the rations....

...... puts me in mind of an SH crewroom long long ago, when a famous SH crewman (G***** B******) was "doing the rations". He went around the marrieds on the Sqn (one was a singly at the time) saying:

"To make things easier for you Sirs, just tell me what choccie bars your brats prefer, so that I can order them for you to nick!!"

And he was only a Sgt then (I said it was a long long time ago.....)

You have a cupboard full of "cheap" Changi umbrellas that actually cost an arm and a leg when the bill for Tiger Beer is taken into account

You can order a taxi in 17 different languages. All of which are Taxi just with different silly accents.

...... and you're a complete arse head :)

Teeters

Wasn't GBH born an ugly grizzled bar steward, aged 50?

and...

a pal once told me that, when a new (possibly on Brits) loadie himself, his gnarled mentor said, "Watch what I do...". At the TOD, he went and grabbed all the best goodies; but was sure to force something onto everone else's bag, "Go on Sir, for the nipper".

Then he says to the newbie, "Now we're all going down- they might do me, but they ain't gonna do a Sqn Ldr for a bottle of squash "

Priceless!

CG

GBH=Bully...........

On reflection, you all knew you were an Ascoteer, when, over the years, you were "allowed" to flout the rules strictly imposed on the rest of the Services, which caused dissention, bad feeling and generally pissed off a lot of people - adding in part, to the inevitable and gradual erosion of the ethos of the RAF

Shame on all you shirt sleeve 'captains' whose only loyalty was to yourselves, where you abused and milked the system for hotels and allowances - you are a disgrace to your commissions
JPA might be a shambles now, but it may eventually right this wrong

Love Many, Trust a Few, Always paddle your own canoe!

Any first aiders out there?

Boy of 15 seems to be choking on his own bile.

On reflection I was a shirt sleeved Ascoteer because I wasn't issued with a flying suit. Cape leather gloves, yes. A big ticker and a pair of shades (for visits to Bermuda and Honolulu) together with a lightweight headset completed the ensemble when ASC was formed in 1967. Seven years later the transition to white shirts with four gold rings came naturally. :ok:

What a bizarre little rant. I take it someone stayed in a hotel once and you didn't? I guess that does explain the state of the RAF today.
There are some splendidly bitter little people out there :D what with Billy The Fish getting his wings for free and Ascot crews staying in hotels all we need now is a plague of locusts and all the portents for the end of the world will be there.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth......

Boy 15,

not had your ration of 'rum, bum and baccy' today? Or is it that dammned scurvy again?

GM

Isn't that what the Darwins said?

Touched a few nerves and consciencies - Good!

Any more gripes from you ASCOT days 9 to 5 non-op sychophants?

Stopstart

I flew through a plague of locusts on an approach into Sharjah during the late fifties. Both engines (Alvis Leonides) seriously overheated and the oil temps went off the clock when the oil coolers clogged up with thick green gunge. Five minutes earlier and we would have not made the runway. It turned out to be very good training for a future Ascoteer

...Yep, get yourself a speel chucker, you winker!

Luvvin this!

Mickey

North American Indian proverb

Thanks buoy.

Thought it was just me!

ah, another amoeba crawls out of the pond to join the fray....

Not an Ascoteer by any means, but from memories of my years at ISK, it was more a case of us not getting what we were entitled to rather than others getting more than they were entitled to.

That is not to say that rules cannot be pushed to near breaking point as that is all part of the game, and a game most Ascoteers seemed to be good at.

Y_G

Ah... the old pprune get out. Post something patently bollox then claim to be fishing when the rest of the world declare you to be something of a knobend :) Genius

http://www.portfolio.mvm.ed.ac.uk/st...12701/cock.jpg

Keep up the good work :D

Ascoteer
 

Clearly, many of the posters in this thread have not looked back to the days of the ASCOT phenomenon that was AIR SUPPORT COMMAND,AKA, TRANSPORT COMMAND. Air Support Command Ops at RAF Upavon was my best ever posting as an AATC. I had too much to say at Shawbury as I then thought I knew the lot and scored the highest pass score of the class to be posted to Upavon, with no fxxxxxg a/c. I worked in ASCOC with some truly great old RAF types who even then dated back to Mosquito and before! John Ford, where are you now? Ops then catered for Hercules. VC10, Brittania, Andover, Comet, not to mention rthe 32 sqdn comms and TQF. We stuck pins in boards on a 24/365 basis to log all the comings and goings of a great fleet known to many as Air Elizabeth! Through thick and thin with many NATO exercises and lots of real drama, many will identify with this post. Many men served before the Tristar days who would be hurt and offended to be so defamed..........:=

Ascoteers
 

Far be it for me to admit that I agree, in part, with Buoy 15 but I believe some of you need to be a little careful with your 'holier than thou' put downs.
You know damn well that there were certain members of your fraternity getting away with more than their fair share (no I won't elaborate on this forum).
The world of Brize is not my domain and I have no intention of being drawn into a slanging match. However, I think sitting on a high horse and pretending that the only issue is the standard of hotels allocated to different people is counter-productive. You must accept that the behaviour of some (I'm certain it is not the majority) has not exactly endeared some of your brethren to the masses.
BV:=

Yawn, there are people in every walk of life, in every camp, flying (or supporting) every type that push/cross boundaries and get away with it. The fact that we know it and have done little/nothing about it reflects on us as much as them.

I find it astounding that certain people feel the need to stamp on a bit of light-hearted fun in the way that they do. Perhaps they should go and start their own thread about how they have only ever stayed in tents and never claimed a day's rates and didn't even know certain allowances existed (and would not claim them even if they had known to save Auntie Betty a few quid to reinvest in equipment), and somehow that makes them all much better than the rest of us.

Yawn

SB

(Not nearly old enough to be a true Ascoteer, but had a brief foray once, which was most enjoyable).

SB
 

Southbound wrote:

"Yawn, there are people in every walk of life, in every camp, flying (or supporting) every type that push/cross boundaries and get away with it."

True enough, but we are not talking about other walks of life right now!

I would suggest that the way in which Ascoteers are viewed by, say, the British Army (arguably your biggest customer) should be of reasonably high importance though! Instead of laughing it off, maybe you should think about it a little more often!
BV:8

buoy15 and BV, you are to a certain extent, quite correct.

The old STC Accounting Instructions were very specific and stated that the allocation of accommodation was not to be influenced by aircraft type, although there was a pecking order of who might have to share if there wasn't enough 'room at the inn'....

Nevertheless, we were quite surprised to receive an 'all stations, all stations' nastygram once from Cyprus. It seemed that a certain fleet had got into the habit of demanding off-base accommodation on each and every occasion, whereas the rule was that you went to Ops and asked where they were putting you up for the night - they had the Big Picture of all movements to and from theatre. Of course if you needed to sleep during the day before a night trip to a nasty zone, trying to sleep through yet another RAFAT practice or jet-powered-motor-glider launch was not terribly conducive to decent rest...

But the primadonnas who waltzed in, refused to stay in Block 101 and demanded off-base hotac do indeed deserve a kick in the goolies.

I only refused the offered accommodation once - and that was in Wales when the St Athan air show organisers had put us into a doss-house full of remand prisoners.....:hmm:

But there is also the fact that many fleets simply didn't know what they were entitled to - and their own accounts people didn't go out of their way to tell them. After my time on tiin triangles, I once sorted out the allowances for our F4 det in Gutersloh (aah!) - when we got back I dictated to the guys how to fill in their forms. They'd never seen them before and were astonished when they actually got a few quid back from accounts a week or so later....... Did they say thankyou? Guess.........:rolleyes:

How do you know you're an Ascoteer??

You claim to have PTSD after doing 3 approaches into BIAP while the rest of us spend 4 months at a time living there.

How do you know you are NOT an Ascoteer?
 

When you think you know more about Ascoteering than those who do it for a living, but have never actually been one yourself. Apparently.

:D

How do you know your NOT an Ascoteer
 

'cos it were tuff, on tut SH force, we used to live in cardboard box in middle of tut tank track, wake up 'alf an hour before we went t' bed 'ave 'alf an 'andful of cold gravel for breakfast, lick Salisbury Plain clean with tongue etc, etc:rolleyes:

;)

When I was on SH we were told that Rate 1's were a fixed wing disease!








'We knew how to whinge but we kept it in the NAAFI bar.'