Have to forgive BFBS for the typo! However nice interview with Comdt AC
She interviews well.
They fixed the typo it is here now http://bfbs.com/news/england/air-cadets-will-continue-grow-62452.html
At 1:44 the cadets are doing majorette rifle drill with No 4s. How come their DPs (LESS WHITE BANDING!) weren’t chopped up? Mine were chopped and we said that we wanted them for ceremonial duties and drill… 
My unit, (and a lot of the rest of my wing) ignored the early threats, again and again. We eventually reached the final, final stage where we were offered the opportunity to purchase them off the RAF, which we did. They were also de-activated further than they were originally, which the committee paid for.
Did that video say there are 960,000 squadrons? :blink:
Baldrick, at the point where we were asked if we still wanted them, we said yes, to get the response that the armory had just chopped them anyway.
We didn’t get back the same ones, I’ll be honest.
nice “summer” shot of a tutor in Aldergrove, hate to think how old some of those shots were!
So wait lets get this right…there’s 45,000 cadets and 960,000 Sqns? Thats 1 cadet roughly every 20 sqns yeah?
[quote=“Baldrick” post=2714]
Did that video say there are 960,000 squadrons? :blink:[/quote]
That’s what I heard!! :woohoo:
Not sure whether it’s meaningful, but I thought it was nice that she hopes to visit every single squadron over her 4 years.
Yes, I spotted that too. That’s some impressive maths their researchers performed there… :unsure:
Could be old stock footage.
I hope she is a positive move on the ATC. She in my eyes is visable and making an effort. Good to see she has the correct hat badge now! 
[quote=“jacques” post=2723]Not sure whether it’s meaningful, but I thought it was nice that she hopes to visit every single squadron over her 4 years.[/quote]Hmm… with roughly 1000 units, that’s 250 per year or one per working day.
Whilst it’s important to get a feel for what’s going on, I wouldn’t want our commander occupied pretty much entirely by just visiting units without having much time to do anything else.
But if she goes to a large wing event - Review/Activities Day, then she would meet cadets from every squadron within the wing…
I think the people who put the stats together for the interview waffle are the same who did the DofE report.
As for the CAC visiting or not so what. I think the CAC has far more important things to do than flit around visiting us, might look good but isn’t really a good use of time IMO. As said turn up for a big parade, wander around chatting, allowing people to think they matter and job done.
Agreed, it’s an excellent interview, CAC did a great presentation.
But it is very scary that a Service Broadcaster can confidently quote that impossible figure of “960,000 squadrons” without even the slightest hesitation. It is wrong by so many orders of magnitude and from so many perspectives, as to make me really question the basic understanding of the reporter and the entire production team across the whole spectrum of defence, economics and common-sense.
GHE2, when you mention an inaccurate DofE report, did it contain any figure even close to this, for anything??
Clearly it’s not just a comma typo, it’s a collosal error. I wonder where they wrongly picked it up from? And what it actually related to?
This integer value approaching one million is so massive made me wonder at first if it’d somehow slipped from having represented the total number of young people living in the UK between the ages of 13 and 17 that would be eligible to join a Cadet Organisation, but no, that’s way up around 4.5 million (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom.
That same wiki page reckons that in boomer years the UK can churn out around 900k babies per annum.
But 960,000…what are there 960,000 of? If you added-up just the numerical quantity of every Service Person, Cadet and Unit in the country, it would still be a fraction of this giant number.
wilf_san
ps interesting to notice that the combined ACO (ie ATC+ RAF(CCF)) Cadet population is almost the same as the ACF by itself…they’re both around 45,000
No, but it’s the same sloppy approach. MI and DM are things I do as part of my real job and if I produced anything like that, it would get at least a raised eyebrow.
As you say she wobbled on without hesitation or deviation.
As you say she wobbled on without hesitation or deviation.[/quote]
Bingo! I reckon I’ve almost worked-out what may have contributed to the reporter’s mistake…well, the source of the data. The BFBS team have had a copy of the 2011/12 Air Cadets Annual Report, which includes twice a graphic reference to “960 Community Based Units of the ATC”, then much- less clearly there’s a reference to ‘202 CCF Sections’. If you’re a media-maestro, that easily becomes shorthanded-down (wrongly) to ‘960 to a thousand squadrons’. The script writer, perhaps fresh from their day out on the carousel, sees this, and with a fountain-pen flourish it’s [I]corrected[/I] to ‘960,000’. The researcher’s got leave to take before the end of the year, and, hey presto, it’s a wrap.
Who’s believing my theory?
wilf_san
ps [strike]Bingo[/strike] Bazinga
sounds about right to me.