RAF Station Commander Appointments
 

https://www.raf.mod.uk/our-organisat...-appointments/

A navigator gets Valley and an engineer gets Brize. Two winged master race under pressure?

Not really, there is a new model for Stations under ASTRA. So this will see a Stn Cdr effectively commanding the people, bogs and drains and a Gp Capt Air Wing Commander running the flying and squadrons. The Air Wing Commander at Brize will be the DDH as well as the Deputy Force Commander. It kind of makes sense, but I am not sure how they will split that across say Coningsby and Lossiemouth.

Also, I see Dan Startup taking RAF Halton that has been non-Aircrew since the days of Al Deere and Bob Weighill. All change, all change...

LJ

Okay, TVM for that. Good luck and congratulations to all of them.

// trk

So, does this do away with OC BSW/Eng/Ops, or, do we keep those posts and just gain another OF5 on Stn? What was/is the driver behind the change?

One word - ASTRA. You need to read up on it, and join in, or get left behind...

Here is an article in the open domain that discusses where ASTRA is taking the Next Generation Royal Air Force. https://www.aerosociety.com/news/bre...glass-ceiling/

Further, there are already many OF-5 Deputy Force Commanders out there - they will become the new Air Wing Commanders as I understand it, as this campaign is rolled out. As I say, I haven’t heard how this will work at Stations without an FHQ. Maybe they will retain Aircrew Stn Cdrs?

Finally, ponder over this quote when it comes to future Chiefs of the Air Staff from Baggers: “We are the only organisation that recruits our CEO based on their hand-eye co-ordination at age 17”. Some truth in that...

BURN HIM...

Some Premiership football clubs hire their managers on the same basis.............

I was at HQSTC when LEAN was being rolled out at units. I asked a 1 star if LEAN was going to be implemented at strike. His answer, ‘of course not, LEAN is aimed at the ranks, not command’. About summed it up for me.

And the relevance to this thread is...?

After I left (93) I knew the world had changed when the ATC 1* (AOC MATO) went to STC as a 2* ABM something, and a gp capt ATCO went to Shawbury as Stn Cdr so he had the job-tick to be the 1* AOC MATO. After that, all bets were off! 😎

Good luck to all who are still in the game, of whichever Branch. The greasy pole must be even slippier these days.

Always thought that the single winged brigade should be limited to Wg Cdr and the zero winged brigade should peak at Flt Lt.

A lot of people have had more than one flying badge/brevet so this could be expanded a bit. Would flying training count if you got chopped?

I’m not convinced there are enough OF5s out there. I’d add an emoji but I’m genuinely surprised by the pointless senior officer job creation. It was never deemed necessary when we had a half-decent sized Air Force in the 80s.

It's a point of view I suppose. However when I was a rockape we didn't really consider most of the single or double winged brigade as proper officers, as most of them had no experience of command until they got up the ranks a bit ;)

TTN
 

Come on. You must know a wind up when you see one?!

BV

TTN

Well, when I was a pilot we didn’t consider RAF Regt to be ‘proper’ Air Force as all they wanted to do was wear DPM and run around pretending to be soldiers 😘

Part of the difficulty is the perceived need to maintain a pyramid leading to CAS+. That requires a reasonable number of candidates in each lower rank from which to select a promotee. And a diminished aircraft inventory means fewer aircrew forming the base of their ‘pyramid’, leading to a very thin ‘shard’.

I recall many years ago the small Fighter Control Branch had a problem with insufficient suitable candidates for promotion to sqn ldr/wg cdr, and had to ‘import’ aircrew to fill some senior appointments. And ATC had a distorted pyramid too ... from the 1* downward ISTR it was approx 1:5:32:150:500, which led to its own problems.

Quite right. I guess that's why they limited themselves to Air Marshal!

Not to mention women :=