So what is the difference between no1and no2 RAF trousers
How long it takes my bat man to iron them.
That, and the quality of the material. No1 is thicker, a better weave. Has no rear pockets or belt loops. No2 trousers have two rear pockets and belt loops. The current fabric is questionable and a bit thin.
1 costs you an arm and a leg and the other doesn’t. As a general rule, if you were desperate you could wear no1 trousers with no2 HD, but certainly not vice versa!
It would be interesting to know what the cost is and if you wanted you could get N°2 trousers made with N°1 fabric. Plus they would fit better than standard issue
II often wear my N°1s in N°2 dress much. But whoever decided the pattern for N°1 trousers was never going to wear them. Not having back pockets and belt loops is a PITA.
No1s don’t need belt loops and pockets as they are designed to be worn with the no1 jacket and held up with braces!
As for material - it didn’t use to be as thin on the no2 trousers as it is now.
Back last century (80s/90s) it was acceptable within the RAF (and RAuxAF/RAFVR) to wear an older, more care-worn set of No1 dress effectively as a No2 dress.
This was despite the existence of the much-maligned (but perfectly functional) No2 dress jacket. I don’t mean that people mixed No1 and No2 jackets and trousers, though.
So saying, the worsted material of No2s was almost as heavy as No1s. And back then, people universally wore older pairs of No1 dress trousers with the woolly pully, as a No2 dress.
But dinosaurs still roamed the earth back then.
The wearing of wedgewood shirts with No3 DPMs was also common (outwith the Regt), as an alternative to the lethal Shirts KF and, short-sleeved shirts were bought from the NAAFI, but totally banned for wear off-station (in fact, you could easily be rollocked by the SWO for wearing them almost anywhere…)
I have a Flt Lt who still routinely wears no. 1 trousers with his no. 2s. He was in a UAS in the 1990s, if that is long enough ago to count…
Following on from Wilf’s comments, many of you may recall that we also had the Lightweight Summer Trousers which could only be worn from Apr - Sep, normal heavyweight ones were worn over the winter.
I thought that the lightweights were pretty good as you could machine wash them, unlike the heavyweight ones and they’d iron up well, but woe betide anyone who wore them outside of the Summer! Lots of the tech trades would wear them all year as they were better under coveralls, but I knew of a Jnr Tech who ended up being charged by the SWO for contravening dress regs as he was caught wearing his lightweights in Jan!
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I always found the lightweight ones a nightmare if you rode to work on a bike. They were never strong enough to deal with excessive wear and use and frequently tore or wore through.