This isn’t healthy & leads to a culture of burn out if not careful.
I use to do this but then realised that it was stagnating me as well as not encouraging others to fill the gap so they were t developing.
100%.
When I was 18-22 ish I was doing 40 to 60 hours of work a week. Plus two parade nights, plus 1 or 2 nights delivering climbing or paddling, plus cadet activities almost every weekend. Gaining quals and then using them. And any weekend I wasn’t doing something with cadets I was either at work doing overtime, or out doing personal AT.
Looking back, I don’t know how I kept up with it! But it did burn me out eventually.
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I have a wife
So do I. She is in the Corps also.
I self-impose a cap of 19 days ‘in peacetime’ for the sake of my marriage.
Very similar, I have a contract drawn up with the mrs that I do no more than one weekend a month. (I am also a one night a week kind of CfAV) I got dispensation for Remembrance Sunday and fireworks night. Y not doing anything in December.
It has slipped below 18 months now. I know from a friend that our Wing HQ have been asked to do some investigative work on why there is a continuing downward trend!
They have also been asked to look into why the new space syllabus has gone down like a lead balloon with cadets.
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Would be good to see a space syllabus more akin to the Air Power, Rocketry, Satellite comms, etc, Senior/Master subjects, rather than academic basics that they should be learning in school, or details about planets that we are hundreds of years away from visiting.
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Probably needs a thread of its own, that
We’ve just been told that, due to financial constraints, we can’t request any uniform for the rest of the financial year. So much for 30 by 30.
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As I said above, do more with less
Alpha section gets to wear the uniform on Tuesday, Bravo section on Thursday
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We ran it at the beginning of this year, directly after our academic phase (specifically because a few cadets wanted to do it).
We lost some people because it was just more academic stuff and sitting in the classroom.
While breadth is good, it also makes it really difficult to cover all bases and develop the knowledge required to lead stuff.
One of my issues with some of the academic stuff is that if I hadn’t had literal pilots on the staff/ senior cadet team, I just wouldn’t have had the time to train myself up on it to run it.
We surveyed the cadets in our squadron to help out wing with some feedback and,
was the number 1 reason why they weren’t interested.
The second reason given for the indifference was the fact that the majority had covered the blue space syllabus in primary school.
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I think this bit is key aspect.
The cadet don’t mind academic training provided it’s new & relevant to their age group.
A cadet who is doing calculations for satellites involving the gravitational constant for physics homework will not be impressed with basic astronomical information the covered when they were 7.
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unfortunately given the topic is space i am struggling to get on board as i am not sure how to make it “real”.
at least with Pilot/Air navigation i can bring into the class a air chart and show them what a pilot uses to navigation.
some basic Speed/Distance/time calculations make it real and then creating a flight plan between Cranwell and Brize Norton with some kinks in the route to make it more interesting, add a light wind and all of a sudden the theory shown in the presentations comes alive and the Cadets “get it”.
any fantasy of being a pilot, be that in the military or civilian route they can understand what they’ll need to do when their time comes.
i can’t see the same link with space.
there are likely calcs to consider regarding payload and fuel/thrust requirements but has limited real “benefit” to the Cadets given the chance of ever needing those skills
this is disappointing to read. i have not looked into any of the material or syllabus but i was expecting it to be more advanced than that
perhaps Space does need its own thread
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I hope the books have been updated from my days in the 80’s when we did ‘Space travel’ as part of the Staff cadet exam …the books then stated ‘one day man will land on the moon’
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Unless we didn’t & the government let that slip through …. 
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Constant problem with our out of date materials.
I was teaching aircraft of the RAF recently and it was ‘here are RAF aircraft … err not that one, that one or that one’!
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The Americans are delusional and think it was filmed in a studio in Hollywood.
Everyone knows it was done at Elstree.
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Using the old raf aircraft is actually better as otherwise it’s “we have three combat aircraft 5 including the Lanc & the spitfire”
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