I think that the ACO does very well on the soft skills (personal presentation, leadership, responsibility etc…), and the ‘hard’ lifeskills that enable some degree of independence - in my Sqn for example, pretty much every cadet leaves having learnt to bake bread, make a tea loaf, a lasagne, an omelette and a crumble - but the aviation stuff, the RAF stuff has not far off disappeared. I’ve got cadets - lots of cadets actually - who have not only never flown or visited a flying station, but who don’t know anyone who has ever flown or visited a flying station.
The crux of that loss wasn’t the loss of mass RAF station camps or AEF flying, or opportunity flights, it’s VGS.
We maintain AT only because we’re a very AT centred Sector, and we make deliberate decisions to concentrate on AT and ignore some of the other things that the ACO would obviously prefer us to do - not that the cadets would prefer us to do those things, but hell, who cares what cadets would prefer to do…