do we know what happened to the money that would otherwise have been spent by ‘gliding’ but which wasn’t as there was no flying?
all the pay at the VGS’s as well as their T&S, and the pay and T&S for for all the cadets and staff who would otherwise have visited said VGS’s…?
At least some of it was spent on AT/DofE, they put a lot into the transport budget for DofE
The money is there, but it was the Defence Infrastructure review (bases?) which is delaying the announcement
What the hell has that got to do with fixing gliders? Unless they are trying to get them fixed on an RAF station that will be sold, or is Systerston due to become a housing estate.
If they’d got on with it, this review would be irrelevant to the need to fix gliders. They’ve just faffed and minced around, such that now it has been lumped in with it.
Whats your source for this?
The only known source, unless the situation has changed, via RC North, 29 Jan 18:
I think there was a CAC Facebook(?) comment to the effect that we would have to wait for the DI review.
Regardless, zip on the formal communication front…
Sorry Mike, to be clear I meant source for the amount of money given and where, if true, is the explanation for where it went.
Ah, makes sense - & the “quote” function helps things along! 
Yes, being £15M adrift would tend to get a few questions asked… so, Teflon, spill the beans!
I’m pretty sure there were some posts referring to that amount of money on here in relation to gliding. I made the assumption (erroneously it may appear) that was in intended to get the gliders sorted out.
If it wasn’t to get the gliders sorted it seems a lot of money to have sloshing around for bits and pieces.
Yeh I couldn’t remember how to from my phone
Does no one else recall this reference to the £15M?
If I got the wrong end of the stick, so be it.
Volunteer Helicopter Squadron?
Just did a search within the thread for “£15” to see what could be found - nothing that I could see for £15M apart from your reference to it. Good rumour to start though!
We can debate the pros and cons of some penny packet money, but it doesn’t really explain what has happened. So far no-one has.
The aircraft were being maintained by a civilian organisation under an MOD contract. I assume, from the fact that no-one has been taken to court, that Serco (whatever anyone might think about them) have complied with that contract at least sufficiently to avoid a claim. That presumably points to faults in the original contact which is probably why no-one has ever really explained what the problem was.
The newly formed Military Aviation Authority (MAA) took over just under two years ago and found that the Vigilant and Viking did not meet the new rules they had dreamed up and grounded them, (sorry "paused’ them). We can debate for ever whether it was the wheel-tappers new hammer that was cracked or the previous aircraft history. Whatever you believe, if the aircraft had been maintained and certified under civil arrangements there would have been no problem (there certainly isn’t a problem with any civil Grob 109Bs on the UK register).
I cannot believe that there are no maintenance records at all. The amount of unnecessary paperwork that the service requires to certify a plastic glider and a plastic glider with a car engine is legendary. A simple aircraft log book does the job outside the service. There must be warehouses full of paper.
So what is wrong/missing? We don’t know as it is shrouded in mystery; if it was all Serco’s fault I am sure we would have heard about it by now. The CAA have a long experience of certifying former foreign registered aircraft with little history and a phone call and a visit will usually sort out what has to be done. Why is the MAA different? Lack of knowledge/experience of light aircraft? It could be, what light aircraft/gliders have been maintained by the service in the last few decades?
Even given all the above, you would think that sometime in the last 23 months advice could have been sought and plans made. After all these were all serviceable aircraft and not complicated ones either.
Perhaps it is time we stopped asking small questions and asked what has really happened. I usually always favour the “cock-up” theory, but this one is certainly looking very much like some sort of conspiracy. To my mind the only conspiracy that makes sense is to protect someone from blame until they have either retired or got their knighthood. The only other possibility is incompetence in high places of such a degree that the persons concerned could not ever be considered competent to oversee the certification of aircraft, or even ride a bike up the shops.
It is not aircraft that have caused all this, it is people.
There are enough civilian glider repair shops to cope with the amount of work with very little slack.
Hmm are you aware of how much of a problem unauthorised modifications and repairs can cause? Do you not remember the contract with Airworks to repair Tornado aircraft?..
Serco are not an approved authority to introdue modifications to aircraft - they are not (to my knowledge) an approved aircraft design authority.
Within the civil World there is such a thing as a minor mod which can be authorised by the CAA and carried out by a normal maintenance organisation. How big were the mods they carried out, then?
These were military reg aircraft? Therefore F714/715 process should have been carried out to introduce any modification - they did no such thing.
We are back to silly arguments that the air force knows best! Quote these rules if you must, but in real terms the fact remains they are not relevant to these aircraft. Whatever has happened to the aircraft, are you suggesting that there are no records? After all the engineers working on them were civil licensed engineers. Who were the service/MOD overseers that should have noticed this in the previous 20 years? Another silence.
Civil maintenance standards are considered acceptable for the Tutor fleet, why should the presence of a military reg mean that safety requires a completely different set of regulations? The aircraft come from the same factory and were built to the same international airworthiness standards.
These are civil aircraft that somehow got a military registration, they are not state of the art warplanes. There is no need for these aircraft to be maintained as complicated military aircraft. I repeat the Vigilant is a plastic glider with a vintage car engine in it; hi-tec it is not.
Taking a perfectly safe civil certificated type and then applying a lot of unnecessary rules invented to cover (mostly ageing) complicated warplanes does not make sense. I asked above how much experience does the RAF have with the maintenance of light aircraft in the last few decades, the answer is none.
I’m sorry you think that my argument was ‘silly’, just making a statement of what should have happened under the rules that the aircraft in question are operated under. I was certainly not trying to make out that aircraft MIL engineering is a load of bollo, CIV engineering rules as I have seen in many of the posts in this thread as you were trying to make out.