Annual camps have been dying for a long time, but there should be something to replace it. We could all run week long camps in theory, however the coming together of 4-6 squadrons with between 10 and 20 from each squadron give an experience that none of the other camps can replicate in terms of strengthening squadrons. Something I know that happened was people who didn’t get on, suddenly being thrown into a situation where they had to work together, with friendships that didn’t exist being forged and many of these lasted. You don’t get this when you go with 3 or 4 others from your sqn
Maybe you need to have experienced the old style camps to get an appreciation of what they ‘gave’. There would have been many who didn’t enjoy or get anything from it, but the majority seemed to as people wanted to go year on year.
This is the only style of camp I ever did as a cadet - and I timed out 15 years ago. And I’m glad! I wouldn’t have wanted to go away as just our unit. All gets pretty incestuous then…
My first camp in 2001 was the only one where we had 10 cadets from the same squadron. Every one i did after that was a handfull (normally 3-4) per camp.
Its slowly diminishing down as the years come on. The wing have 3 camps allocated this year, my squadron has 2 places throughout all 3 camps.
I think there are only 2 camps: consecutive weeks for half of RAFAC each. We got notified of the camp at the end of January with a letter dated 12 Dec 18
Perhaps your region has not allocated places to your wing, your wing hasn’t allocated places to your squadron, or your admin chain is sloppy.
I can’t understand what is so difficult.
The maths is straightforward : camp has x places / y regions / z wings gives the number of places per Wing, or is that too simple? It can get into a cat fight between Wings after that.
Or do people like to make this more complicated to make it look like they have a job?
It’s not that simple though. Your equation would work if every wing/region had the same numbers of cadets but they don’t. That means you need to weight the allocations otherwise the cadets in the smaller wings would get a greater chance of a place
I don’t see that’s really an issue, your not getting 1 place per Squadron and its not like the people doing the sorting actually know the Cadets. If every Squadron puts forward 1 Cadet to Wing and every Wing has the same number of places its the same odds of getting a place no matter which Wing you are in.
It is though.
All we need is as early a notification as possible of the number of places for our respective Wings, we can then advertise to cadets and notify Wing. Currently finding out late in the day because someone wants to apply some fancy formula to allocate places is not good enough, if cadets are going to get a decent shout at participating.
I agree with you that we need more notice. The equation is (or should be) more complicated than you suggest but the figures are all there and the formula won’t change much each year so it shouldn’t take long at all to calculate the places per wing.