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British Army lowers minimum rank required to become helicopter pilot. Privates can now apply.

"Personnel can now apply to become a British Army pilot at the rank of private." 👏


Meanwhile, over the RAF's Officers' Mess ...

Season 20 Episode 13 GIF by The Simpsons
 
Hmmm - first time I flew in a helicopter was an AAC Gazelle, piloted by a Cpl. His observer was a L/Cpl.
 
The whole "only Officers can be pilots" is a really dumb thing.

Like most of these rules, it has more to do with protectionism and classism than it does actually validating someone's competency to pilot an aircraft.
 
There's some more detail about this in the Feb 2022 edition of Soldier magazine. (go to page 34)


I'm looking forward to the day that an article like this appears in a Canadian Armed Forces journal of some kind.

At that point I will be confident that we are becoming more 'normal' and less 'Needermeyer' )

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"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing." Oscar Wilde ;)


Costing Up The Value of Everything - Is There Really £13bn Waste' in Defence?



The MOD has been accused of wasting some £13bn of taxpayers money since 2010. This serious charge, levied by the main UK political opposition party, is at the core of a ‘dossier’ which suggests that there has been serious and profligate mismanagement in Defence, with enormous amounts of public money wasted, which could have been spent elsewhere. Is this a fair and reasonable accusation to make?

From the outset, it is important to be clear that this blog article is not taking a subjective view on the political party in question, nor is it taking political sides. This blog is, and always has been apolitical in its approach, and has not, and will not, express any views on the political views or policies of Political parties. This blog should be seen as an impartial attempt to understand the charges, and present an alternative perspective on some parts of them.

Waste is an enormously emotive word, and one that brings to mind images of inept public sector workers intentionally taking decisions that knowingly are poor value for money, or which represent decisions that will hurt the front line, because they simply don’t care.

Speak to anyone who has dealt with the public sector and they will all provide similar stories of how this organisation seems bloated and inefficient, or another seems far too profligate with the cash. There is a strong sense among some that the MOD is not an organisation fit for purpose, and in turn it is wasteful with vast sums of public money.

There is a counter view here, which is that the MOD is a department which is charged with handling perhaps the most diverse spending portfolio of any Governmental department. It must handle responsibility for everything from nuclear missiles to educational facilities and housing estates – over a quarter of a million people on practically every continent of the planet are in some way linked to Defence.

Defence has to both be a strategic department of state, taking a long term perspective on developments that may not come to pass for decades to come, and make assumptions on costs, capabilities and threats that may never materialise. An example of this is the Type 23 frigate, which has its genesis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and whose procurement was a key part of the Knott 1981 Defence Review, 41 years ago, and will be in service in the UK until the mid 2030s.

Intended for a design life of 18 years in the North Atlantic, the Type 23 force will have been in UK service for almost 50 years by the time the last UK hull finally pays off in the middle of the next decade. From concept to disposal, this is a life cycle of roughly 60 years.

To ask the Royal Navy of 1980, led by WW2 veterans like Admiral Sir Henry Leach, who fought in big gun actions against the Scharnhorst to imagine the role of a vessel design that would still be in service almost 100 years after he joined the Royal Navy is a sign of how significant the passage of time is in Defence. This matters because when financial decisions are taken, they can have effects that may be felt for many years to come in a variety of ways and means.

To look at the arguments for waste, there appear to be several core themes. Firstly that the MOD paid off equipment early, thus incurring a waste against its net asset value. There is also an argument that cost overruns, procurement delay and extensions to keeping equipment in service longer also helped incur ‘waste’ by requiring spending that could have saved money and been used elsewhere.

The report highlights the sums of money that could be saved and how many types of equipment could have been bought with this if it had been spent differently. This is perhaps somewhat disingenuous as it supposes that there is a central pool of money and that all the funding could be reallocated to a new project.

In reality cost changes can sit across multiple budget areas, meaning that while on paper a decision to do something may save £1bn, in reality this may break down into penny packets of cash, split into different budgets and over many years – there is not a lump sum of £1bn magically available.
 
I'll bet dollars to donuts there people that get absolutely apoplectic at the thought of having to obey a Lance Corporal aircraft commander. :ROFLMAO:
I really enjoy how absolutely ridiculous it is.

The reality is if you can fly you can fly and no amount of schooling/degrees/etc is going to change that fact.

Look at a guy like Lewis Hamilton, one of the best race car drivers of all time, doesn't have a degree or anything and came from a working class upbringing.

He can drive a freaking race car though and the same should be true for pilots. If anything, the requirement for a degree wastes valuable years of stick time and early development.

Sure, if they want leadership positions get them a degree, otherwise get the people that wanna ride hard and fast in the cockpit ASAP!
 
Sure, if they want leadership positions get them a degree, otherwise get the people that wanna ride hard and fast in the cockpit ASAP!
If we ever don't have enough recruits for Pilot (lol) then there would be a good argument for opening it up to NCMs.
 
I really enjoy how absolutely ridiculous it is.

The reality is if you can fly you can fly and no amount of schooling/degrees/etc is going to change that fact.

Look at a guy like Lewis Hamilton, one of the best race car drivers of all time, doesn't have a degree or anything and came from a working class upbringing.

He can drive a freaking race car though and the same should be true for pilots. If anything, the requirement for a degree wastes valuable years of stick time and early development.

Sure, if they want leadership positions get them a degree, otherwise get the people that wanna ride hard and fast in the cockpit ASAP!
Many of the Battle of Britain pilots were teenaged Sgts.
 
Some numbers


"If the issue of aircraft allocations was a complex one, commissioning should have been very straightforward. The 1942 Ottawa agreement had stipulated unequivocally that all RCAF pilots, navigators, and air bombers who met the appropriate Canadian standards would be commissioned, regardless of the 50 per cent limit imposed in 1939. Yet, in November 1942, Power was surprised to learn that only 28. 7 per cent of RCAF pilots and observers overseas were, in fact, commissioned. With commissions in the field still subject to Air Ministry approval* and the RCAF automatically promoting 25 per cent of its pilots and observers on graduation from the BCATP, those figures meant that the RAF was commissioning fewer than 4 per cent of Canadians. That reluctance did not extend to its own aircrew, however, as on I September 1942 57 per cent of RAF pilots and observers were officers. The discrepancy was even greater in the case of pilots, as 67 per cent of those wearing RAF uniforms held commissions compared with only ·29 per cent in the RCAF. 6

. . .

In the end, Ottawa and London simply agreed to disagree, Canada circumventing the RAF's reluctance to commission Canadians in the field by the simple expedient of commissioning a larger number of BCATP graduates. 70 By these methods the percentage of commissioned RCAF pilots, navigators, and bomb-aimers serving overseas increased from 28.7 per cent in August I942 to 52.2 per cent a year later (compared with 54.3 per cent of RAF aircrew in the same categories) and to 74.3 per cent by August 1944 (63-4 per cent in the RAF). Among RCAF wireless operators and air gunners, the percentage of officers increased from 8.6 per cent in August 1942 (II.I per cent in the RAF) to 15.5 per cent in August 1943 (14.8 per cent in the RAF) and to 25.7 per cent by August I944 (25.8 per cent in the RAF). 7 ' "
 
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