Will the MOD ever learn
 

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage...icle895847.ece

A young life for just a £50 pound bit of kit:ugh:

RIP

Lost for words :ugh:

Lost for words myself.....:ugh:

Well, if this article is to be believed, things are only set to get worse...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7287525.stm

An awful tragedy, that is becoming an all too common-place occurrence. :(

and what do you expect from military forces, from ANY military forces?

you will die anyway!and they own your life,... you signed it, so why do you complain now.
none forced you to enroll!!!???so???:*

I don’t know the details, but the scenario painted here is all too familiar.


If the radio is really £50, or even £500, (it’s nearer the former, I know the kit) you do this;

Ask Unit to provide a shopping list. How many. Training. Manuals. Trials. Call it consumable, no repair contract required.

Get quote from supplier. Invite him to supply trials kit and support for trials. They won’t charge, but subsume it in the main quote.

Write a short Business Case / Submission. (Less than £5M, one side A4 max). Put, in ******* great bold type at the top, “Duty of Care / Critical Health and Safety Constraint”.

Sign the Technical and Financial Approval. (Even the lowest technical grade in DE&S should be able to approve 2 or 3 million).

Hand to Financier for Financial Endorsement (they don’t approve, they just state where the money’s coming from). Don’t leave his desk until it’s signed. There isn’t an IPT in MoD that can’t find such a small sum in underspend or offest. Many IPTs will spend £1500 a day on consultants. That’s 30 radios.

Walk across to Commercial, and ask them to e-mail authority to the Unit to purchase what they want on Local Purchase Order, or, trot off a small value order contract.


One of my old IPTs used to do this for fun every day. It’s not breaking any rules, it’s meeting a Duty of Care obligation. If, as it seems in this case, people get “pedantic” (i.e. so far up themselves) there is a slightly more devious, but quicker, route. Of course I don’t condone being devious……….

I’m puzzled though. Given the radio, or something very similar, is used in-service, why on earth does the Requirement Manager not simply get it scaled to the school? They place a demand and the system takes over….. The company who supplies the antenna used to supply them free!!!

Something not right here.

We expect the full and proper backing of the government and the people of this country! Nothing more, nothing less.

And yes, we did sign on the dotted line, but at the end of the day someone has to. Otherwise, you would not have the right to free speech or, therefore, the right to come on this forum and spout s:mad:t like that.

What a complete prat you are. Yes, people enlist and like any other job, why shouldn't they expect to have the required equipment to train with. I am sure you wouldn't expect to fly if essential equipment was missing or not provided so why should the forces especially when their lives are at risk unlike people who sit on their fat arrises and shout about something they probably have no experience of.

QUOTE "Hand to Financier for Financial Endorsement (they don’t approve, they just state where the money’s coming from). Don’t leave his desk until it’s signed. There isn’t an IPT in MoD that can’t find such a small sum in underspend or offest. Many IPTs will spend £1500 a day on consultants. That’s 30 radios." UNQUOTE

Remember the time when I had a hand in signing for exactly this function. The opportunity arose when IPT staff didn't know exactly where to place their stapler on their desks and resulted in the IPT spending over £1M in hiring consultant numpties to provide the in depth knowledge. Made me want to puke, but when a person wearing a very wide blue bar with a thinner one next to it advises you to do as he asks, you do just that!

MTB

consultants
 

MTB

Agreed. Tragic

tucumseh,

You put it succinctly however most people do not know the ropes.

We needed a GPS. Command approved our case. By chance a chap visited the unit with service supply item. I copied the sec & ref and then we entered the red tape circuit.

We tracked down the IPT. We found out what we had to do. The man at Command had moved on. The man at the IPT was gapped or some such. We went round the buoy 3 times at least until eventually a staff officer was in place and he contacted the man at the IPT and the paperwork was squared away.

The supply chain 'sprang' into action - and nothing happened.

I chased the IPT; he chased supply; the GPS was in stores waiting to be collected; no one had told us it was there. It took about 2 years all told from need to getting my hands on it.

Of the 5 unts demanded for 5 units I have no idea if they all arrived!

An unsurprising and sad event unfortunately.

As an aside, I thought the article was incredibly poorly written. The first paragraph states Dan 'plummeted to his death from 2500' then later on in the article it says 3000'. Not only that, the main article stated he was 25 years old but his picture caption states 35.

Oh, it's from the Sun. :rolleyes:

Written for the masses but if you read again with the IQ it is intented to serve you will realise they were trying to communicate the fact that he was the 35th to die.:(

I doubt it was a high as 2,500' if he was jumping static-line. UK training jumps done from 1,000, ISTR. Talk of operational static-line jumps at 650'.

If you read the letter from Nick Martin you will see they were talking about Static Line Square (LL variant) which have a clearance much above 2500ft. Somewhere near 10k from what I remember.

I'm a bit (no, a lot!!) puzzled. It's been a long time since I had anything to do with 'meat bombing' and, in my day, we didn't carry a reserve!! Given that reserves are now worn and that this guy was experienced special forces (given quoted rank), did he REALLY have to be TOLD, BY RADIO, to pull his reserve??? Does self-preservation not enter into it at all?? :confused:

CJ - reserves have been worn by SL jumpers for at least thirty years. The Sun article says of Dan Wright " It was his first day training with the Special Forces".

Sounds as though he'd passed Officer Selection for 22, and had been sent to Brize to get para-qual'd.

Dartagnan = Illiterate, ignorant, and probably foreign, TW@T!!:mad:

By this rationale, you signed up to fly a certain number of sectors a year for your 'EU' airline. If Richard Reid 'the Second' brings your aluminium tube down to earth with his shoes.... well, you signed the contract, why is your family complaining about it, nobody forced you to become an airline pilot so???:ugh:

Training Risky

"Dartagnan = Illiterate, ignorant, and probably foreign, TW@T!!:mad:"

Steady on, the spelling wasn't that bad.