so, complete waffle 
Well, there is another part about an ongoing safety investigation following a tragic incident.
So regarding this:
Someone unfortunately has been within the MOD system - somewhere that could feasibly have been in the “potential” pile of usable locations for us to explore an expansion (if we were so minded).
Yes, but this fatality involved a free fall jump whilst wearing a non-issue body suit fitted with wings. Something cadets were never involved with.
Its a bit like banning air rifle shooting because somebody in the RAF Regt has had an accident with a GPMG!
It is however, a handy reason to ban something when you are trying to save money.
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“There is insufficient capacity within Defence to offer assured solo parachute training to Cadet Forces. AOC 22 Gp will not authorise parachuting from non-Defence delivery providers (including Defence sport parachuting organisations). Solo parachuting has, therefore, been removed from the approved activity list until further notice.”
If I recall correctly, it was a mortar tube.
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It’s a definitely about saving money/removing fun - if there’s currently no capacity, then there’s currently no capacity. That doesn’t make it unsafe, or not something we should be doing, or that there’ll never be capacity in the future.
You don’t have to remove from the list of approved activities because there’s currently no spaces, in the same way that if you ring up a restaurant and they can’t give you a table, you don’t have to decide to never go there again…
Worth noting that if a RAF station decides that this year it just doesn’t have capacity for a cadet camp because of operational commitments, the ACO doesn’t flounce off and never go there again.
Same thing. Fun police, nothing more, and nothing less.
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Maybe the whole reason we’re getting rid of the L144s (in “selected” regions) is because of the Royal Marine who left his L85 on Dartmoor?
Reading through the incident it appears there were issues with the parachute type as well some questions around safe practise (height for emergency drills etc) & need for wrist altimeter alarms. There’s a recommendation for a working group including the NGB to be formed to look at the practise.
From an RAFAC perspective:
- courses were very rare.
- there was no real appetite to expand availability prior to the incident.
- we have massive budget cuts which affect core long established activities - the expenditure in energy is just not available for parachuting, something that has always been a nice to have.
It’s the right call.
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Negative, it was only nice to have becuase the course were a) few and far between and b) onky ran at one location.
Improve the availability of the course and it would have allowed more cadets the opportunity to participate (and subsequently say how good it was and get more cadets interested in the sport)
If only there were numerous parachuting schools in the UK.
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Ditto flying and gliding clubs!
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Chief has already touched on this, but the simple version of what you have both described is called “operating outside of the approved SST, with insufficient safeguards and mitigations”.
That requires investigation and it is not correct to halt activities at least until the outcome is clear. While we’re using disingenuous fallacy, not supporting this move is a bit like not supporting the without prejudice suspension of a CFAV under investigation because the incident didn’t happen with cadets around.
Besides…
It’s closer to pausing L98 because the RAF Regt had an incident involving the catastrophic failure of a recently serviced L85. I think that would be fair. More directly relevant (as you pointed out the abnormalities of the incident) would be the pausing of Fieldcraft following a cadet fatality while the CFAV involved weren’t following accepted protocols. Or perhaps a better parallel is stopping criteria-led fitness testing of cadets due to fatalities within the MOD - that’s something that didn’t happen to a cadet.
I would love for activities like parachuting to stay on our list and even be expanded. But we can’t be flippant with safety - I don’t believe this is an overreaction such as banning of staplers because a cadet spent a couple of hours in A&E after giving themselves an A4 sized tongue, it’s very high RTL where that risk has been realised in what should be a professional-level environment and possibly not sufficiently mitigated against.
Even casting budget issues aside, I don’t think this is unreasonable.