Not good. 

 

 

Yikes! I hope the RAF can get their stuff together soon!

2 hours ago, n4gix said:

Yikes! I hope the RAF can get their stuff together soon!

Not much chance of that, I'm afraid.  The Ministry of Defence is even more incompetant now than it always used to be and as a former RAF officer I despair.

The Ministry comprises mainly Civil Servants, with a contingent of serving officers from the 3 services.  When I began flying in the 1960s nearly all senior RAF officers were ex wartime pilots with a vast range of experience. Most senior Civil Servants had also worked through the war.  By the mid 70s that was gone.  Senior Civil Servants today will have usually started their careers with an 'Oxbridge' degree in philosophy and politics, or studied Classics, becoming experts in Latin and ancient Greek. The military presence in the Ministry of Defence is mainly 'fast track' career officers.  In general, the more senior they are, the less operational experience they will have had, because 'high flyers' are promoted very quickly through each level. Rapid promotion depends very much on not 'rocking the boat. With current budget constraints and the new focus on diversity, equality and inclusion, it appears that air defence is not high on the agenda.

Edited August 10, 20223 yr by Biggles2010

Agree John - a miserable situation now as I found recently when I met a young trainee hanging around waiting for a slot.  My timing was the same as yours and from attestation to arriving on my first Lightning squadron, I had just one month delay (and I spent that sitting in the rh seat of a Nav training Varsity).   Happy days!

 

John R

Have seen this in the past in USN where nugget officers were hanging around waiting for a slot at primary (Pensacola).

 

The problem of IPs -- I don't think it is considered career enhancing, compared to a fleet seat.

 

scott s.

.

 

 

This is a huge and recurring problem for the USAF as well.  My first staff job, as a newly-minted AF major, was as a pilot-navigator force analyst at the AF Military Personnel Center, where I was literally buried in the mechanics of this problem.  This was during the Cold War drawdown of the mid-1990s, one of the biggest manpower shocks in the USAF's history.  As a result of the massive force drawdown following the fall of the Berlin Wall, we found ourselves with a huge surplus of pilots and navigators, and our senior leaders threw the brakes on new pilot and especially nav production to keep our existing flyers flying, which was a predictably short-sighted and epic mistake, because clamping the training pipelines down to a trickle created a huge gap in the accession of new young pilots/navs that whiplashed a few years later into severe shortages that impacted the force for over a decade going forward.

The problem is a tough one--you're limited, not just in how many pilots you can produce, but how many you can "absorb" into the force--there must be enough cockpit seats and flying hours for them to continue to fly, maintain proficiency, and gain the requisite experience to become...errrrr..."experienced" pilots.  When a gap is created in the pilot force by shorting new entries, you can't go back and fill that gap in later with the experienced pilots that would have been aging through the force had you not cut production--and if a surge is needed you can't just wave a wand and start cranking out pilots and the planes they fly--the budgeting, programming, and materiel acquisition of the immense resources required is done 5+ years in advance.  Shocks to the system, most of which are unplanned and unforeseen, produce imbalances that take years--no decades--to work back into equilibrium, be it a rapid loss or gain of cockpits/flying time due to budget or force structure changes, reduction of new aviator production due to limited training capacity, or hemhorraging experienced mid-career pilots due to airlines hiring them away and/or the AF driving them away though sustained excessive operations tempo/overwork, etc.

The trail of tears and broken glass this left in my day was just butt-fugly...we had kids in pilot training that graduated and were immediately put into desk jobs for up to 3 years, the universally-reviled "banked" pilot program.  Add to that our merit-based assignment system, and the guys who ended up in the "bank" were the tail-end Charlies on the pilot training merit list, and one doesn't need a lot of imagination to guess how well kids that were already struggling just to get through UPT did after three years cooling their heels out of the cockpit.   We had kids in AFROTC and the AF Academy that lost their pilot training opportunities altogether, and others were put into a holding pattern for a year or more after commissioning waiting to get into training.  And on the back side whiplash a few years later, we had solid officers, most especially navs, who had moved off to opportunities in other specialties and were having rock-star careers as logisticians, acquisitions officers, engineers etc, and they were later forced to come back to the cockpit as senior majors and lieutenant colonels and once again serve as line navigators doing the same job they did as captains, effectively ending their careers.

So best case, even with competent decision-makers, it's a crapshoot, because all you can do is plan for the conditions you expect way out front of you, and it's virtually certain that when you get there the world will look different.  And then add in a few bull-headed senior leaders in critical positions that won't listen to their subordinates and their staffs, and Baby, look out below...

1 hour ago, FOD said:

from attestation to arriving on my first Lightning squadron, I had just one month delay (and I spent that sitting in the rh seat of a Nav training Varsity).   Happy days!

Happy days indeed.  Like you, I also spent my time between training courses as a Varsity co pilot, in my case with air electronics students. With 6 hour flights It soon added quite a few twin piston hours to my logbook.  When I look back, I can hardly believe the freedom we had in those days, together with the large number and variety of aircraft in service and the amount of flying available.

 

Edited August 10, 20223 yr by Biggles2010

A pathetic 11 pilots only will be fully trained up this year. 😲

Issues with the Hawk trainer. Experienced pilots quitting for better pay in the defence industry.

Pilots having to take refresher courses because they have to wait so long for slots to open up on the next stage of their training. 

Edited August 11, 20223 yr by martin-w