Gliding "paused"

Everyone Flying
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[quote=“glass half empty 2” post=19958]
It would seem that we will need to have a full time non flying Adj at the VGS and full time engineering support with a properly drawn up SLA, with penalties. To say it will go back to how it was after this flap, is just asking for trouble.[/quote]

it has always been a question in my mind how when attending AEF the Babcock ground crew did everything yet when doing my VGS it was the pilots and staff Cadets.

dont get me wrong it was great experience for the Staff Cadets/GS students to get hands on moving the aircraft in/out the hanger and preparing them/tucking them up for the night as required but does show that the Tutors were/are looked after with a greater degree of “ownership” by those tasked with maintenance than the Vigilants.
yes i know the Tutors are used for more then just Cadet AEF while the Vigilants only get used 99% of the time on the weekends…and i guess with a lack of available aircrew any issues and it is tucked away and an engineer is called out

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[quote=steve679]
it has always been a question in my mind how when attending AEF the Babcock ground crew did everything yet when doing my VGS it was the pilots and staff Cadets.

don’t get me wrong it was great experience for the Staff Cadets/GS students to get hands on moving the aircraft in/out the hanger and preparing them/tucking them up for the night as required but does show that the Tutors were/are looked after with a greater degree of “ownership” by those tasked with maintenance than the Vigilants.
yes I know the Tutors are used for more then just Cadet AEF while the Vigilants only get used 99% of the time on the weekends…and I guess with a lack of available aircrew any issues and it is tucked away and an engineer is called out[/quote]

The aircraft are on different maintenance policies and therefore different support contracts. Someone in the appropriate PT takes the manufacturers’ maintenance requirements, looks at flying rates etc etc and issues the approved policy for the aircraft. The Tutors may be different because they are civil aircraft, but that should only be in the engineering organisation’s approval (EASA 145 vs MRP 145 and the requirements of these are very similar). Essentially, the process for getting a maintenance policy is pretty much the same, so someone (NOT HQAC) has decided that operators can do more maintenance on the gliders than on the Tutor.

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Cygnus

This is an elephant in the room. At the minute VGS personnel are authorised to do weekly maintenance and other maintenance tasks via the aircrew certificate of servicing. However this was only designed for fast jets and helicopter crews to do flight servicing in the event of landaways, never for aircrew to do maintenance. If I was commandant I wouldn’t be comfortable with carrying that risk anymore.

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At the moment they aren’t all 4124s for aircrew were suspended by the Chief Engineer until he designed a new system.

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Correct.

From what I’ve been told, half the battle with correcting this whole omnishambles is that the RAF and the MAA, quite frankly, do not understand the concept of volunteers. (A song I’m sure we all know, whether we fly or not.) They have set up an engineering regime that expects pretty much everything to be done by a dedicated tradesman and overseen by an EngO. In reality, the 7-Day OOPS on a Vigilant doesn’t really involve anything more complicated than anything you’d expect a diligent car owner to carry out on a regular basis (fluid and tyre pressure checks and looking at stuff closely). Accordingly, 2 FTS is having to try and get a number of exemptions from the MAA for the stuff that any responsible pilot should be doing him/herself before going flying.

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Reply on this topic:

http://www.pprune.org/military-aviation/538497-air-cadets-grounded.html

suggests full ops normal not until October next year…

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[quote=“tmmorris” post=20550]Reply on this topic:

http://www.pprune.org/military-aviation/538497-air-cadets-grounded.html

suggests full ops normal not until October next year…[/quote]
The problem seems to be a QI “nobody knows”. I’d put more faith in the met office predicting this weekend, that next summer will be a BBQ one, than any idea of when gliding will be back on stream from the powers that be. There are too many variables some known and some unknown, the biggest one is how many instructors will come back. They have been effectively NEP since April and I can imagine a number having enjoyed having the summer to themselves may well feel that they can do without it.

I’ve got cadets askng about GS and I’m just shrugging my shoulders. I can see it being a struggle to keep them, more so some of the older ones, and others engaged. I’m probably not alone in having cadets who have been in the Air Cadets for nearly 2 years and not flown in a Tutor or glider.

I would rather they said gliding will start on x rather than some sort of drip feed of what is, for my money, speculation, that only serves to give false hope.

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Why were VGS instructors not posted to squadrons for the duration of the “pause”. They are VR(T) officers, so should still be asked to put in 12 hrs a month. Could have gone a long way to running more activities for the cadets during the pause b

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some of them have.

i know a VGS pilot who is also a OC, he has been able to exercise his shooting quals alot more on the weekends and i know of two such events he has done so…

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Probably because they didn’t know how long the pause would be. Not much use ‘posting’ someone to a sqn, only for them to go back to their gliding a couple weeks later. A bit late to do anything now, one would summise.

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There has been lots of overdue admin, training and various airfield and HQ tasks to do on VGSs so everyone has done their attendance in the main

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[quote=“juliet mike” post=20568]Why were VGS instructors not posted to squadrons for the duration of the “pause”. They are VR(T) officers, so should still be asked to put in 12 hrs a month. Could have gone a long way to running more activities for the cadets during the pause b

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Even as a bog standard CGI G1 pilot, you’d probably be doing close to twice that amount in a weekend when the aircraft are operating. If you’re an exec like an OC/CFI/Adj then you’ll pretty much have a second full-time job. Even with the- ahem- “pause” we’re still getting the Syerston crowd carrying out inspections and picking peanuts out of poo with our admin. We still have mandatory training like the human factors seminars, FAW requalifications, BASIC courses, practice crashes, fire training, driver training, synthetic parachute training and all the other usual niffnaff and trivia, like re-reading a stack of orders and publications about 8-10inches high, like we have to do every 3 months, and then signing that we understand everything in there. We’re also spending time in the classrooms improving and refreshing our knowledge. The difference is now we are only committing about 20hrs a month to this stuff, instead of the 80-140 we usually do, so please excuse the guys who are currently enjoying the joy of the odd weekend to themselves after sometimes decades of regular seven day working weeks.

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Sounds like being on a squadron :slight_smile:

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[quote=“stevenhawkingstennisracquet” post=20591][quote=“juliet mike” post=20568]Why were VGS instructors not posted to squadrons for the duration of the “pause”. They are VR(T) officers, so should still be asked to put in 12 hrs a month. Could have gone a long way to running more activities for the cadets during the pause b

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk[/quote]

Even as a bog standard CGI G1 pilot, you’d probably be doing close to twice that amount in a weekend when the aircraft are operating. If you’re an exec like an OC/CFI/Adj then you’ll pretty much have a second full-time job. Even with the- ahem- “pause” we’re still getting the Syerston crowd carrying out inspections and picking peanuts out of poo with our admin. We still have mandatory training like the human factors seminars, FAW requalifications, BASIC courses, practice crashes, fire training, driver training, synthetic parachute training and all the other usual niffnaff and trivia, like re-reading a stack of orders and publications about 8-10inches high, like we have to do every 3 months, and then signing that we understand everything in there. We’re also spending time in the classrooms improving and refreshing our knowledge. The difference is now we are only committing about 20hrs a month to this stuff, instead of the 80-140 we usually do, so please excuse the guys who are currently enjoying the joy of the odd weekend to themselves after sometimes decades of regular seven day working weeks.[/quote]

You mean you do stuff like staff on squadrons, but you get to go flying (when they work) for free as a bonus. Can you claim pay too?

As a minimum I do 35 hours a month, which is an extra week’s work. 99% of the time I do more than that too. No flying for me :wink:

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The first of the fleet returned to the air this morning. Only another 140 to go :slight_smile:

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Wrong fleet though :slight_smile:

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I hope the subsequent airframes take less than 10 months! Thank goodness that this wasn’t a commercial business.

And already running behind on the previous forecast date for the first 5 to back in service…

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Elsewhere, there have been suggestions that (1) a large number of gliders might go to civil maintenance organisations in order to get them back in the air quicker, & (2) that registration on the civilian books is under investigation in order to have more appropriate airworthiness oversight than compared to MAA requirements.

Anyone “in the system” heard these options?

Oh, I haven’t been able to check relevant ACTOs, but looking at the Air Cadet Pilot Scheme, if the entry requirements are still the same (also for Air Cadet Pilot Navigation Scheme):

The longer the lack of gliding issue goes on, then there will be an expanding time period when no-one will be able to apply. Will there be a temporary revision of the section criteria?

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I think but can’t confirm that there has already been a relaxation on that particular silver wings requirement.

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Concerning the revisions to ACT035, I have messaged OC2FTS, extracts from my message:

[quote]Reference A: ACTO35 (Rev 2.00)

Reference B: CAA Document 31 (Version 118)(2 versions more in date than specified in Ref A)

…looking for any amendments to Ref A in the future, please may I make a suggestion. Had the arrangement been with a flying organisation not listed in Ref B, then the administrative task of confirming aircraft types, names of pilots, etc, in good time, would be exceptionally difficult, if not impossible. To apportion aircraft type & specific pilot to a cadet would depend on availability on the day, which could easily be negated by aircraft technical issues (or pre-booked hire to someone else), or, the pilot might be on a day off (or near to maximum duty hours, etc). As I see it, a change of criteria after the approval process had been met would invalidate the approval. The only way currently around this difficulty would be to “block request” - but then that would require each aircraft type/pilot/cadet combination to be submitted for approval; if there were 3 possible aircraft types, 4 possible pilots & 10 cadets wanting to be flown, that would total 120 separate applications to cover all permutations! Of course, that is unrealistic. I suggest that Annex A should have the option to be accompanied by a list of aircraft types & relevant pilot details in a tabulated list. Please can you confirm that this would be acceptable if required.

One minor note, as the lead time for getting the entire administrative process completed could be lengthy - the relevant detail for the pilot hours in last 30 days, etc, could have changed (away on holiday, etc), so this is not really a true indication of accuracy.

Incidentally, please is there a “recommended” time for action at each stage? The current process is:

Sqn Cdr - > Wg
Wg -> Region
Region -> HQ 2FTS (10 days before activity date) (as HQ 2FTS are to retain an electronic copy of all submissions, then I presume ALL forms will have to be scanned for transmission to HQ 2FTS)
HQ 2FTS -> Region
Region -> Wg/Sqn

Could this be speeded up slightly by having HQ 2FTS c.c. the relevant sqn? At least they would get the yes/no answer sooner, which would assist their planning.

I note that the application & approval process does not have a date or timeframe mentioned. Please can you confirm the intention here. I would presume that if no date was specified & the original flying date was postponed (bad weather for example), then the approval would still be valid; if so, then perhaps this should be specified? Is there a time validity once the approval has been given (other than the link to the relevant time from for the ACO AvMed Form1)? Otherwise, on the basis that an subsequent attempt to re-fly is likely to be within a very short period (probably within one to 2 weeks?), there is the possibility that sqns will consider that re-application would be necessary,[/quote]

I appreciate that the oversight & safety is essential (oh for the good old days when the signed F3822 was all you needed to launch off in a Chipmunk!) but we need to make the process simpler (& quicker) for all. The ACTO doesn’t really specify, but perhaps if a sqn scans/emails the relevant forms up the chain, maybe this will help things along?