As 4th Mechanised begins operations in Afghanistan that struck me was that elements of the 2 Merlin Squadrons (28 and 78 Sqn) are sharing the burden, in separate reporting from Jane’s it appears that ground crew for the handful of Merlin’s deployed in theatre have been provided by Royal Navy personnel originally trained for the HM.1 variant.
Is this just normal good practice for Joint Helicpoter Command or is it a sign that the availability of air and ground crew has and continues to be a problem?
Good luck to them all of course.
I can’t see it’s doing much for retention if you joined the Navy to go to sea, either on a Frigate flight, or from the carriers as a Merlin maintainer. Of course they will get nice campaign medals, but still how bad has it got when the JHC needs to rob Naval ground crew to support deployed RAF aircraft ?
I’m guessing here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if indeed there is a structural shortage of (qualified) maintenance personnel. Besides that, the other Merlin sqns are also still in the process of standing up, and if I was running JHC, it would be very tempting to move ground crew around the other hard pressed Puma, Chinook and Apache sqns. Training and education but also spares have had cuts and delays due to budgetting issues, so the shortage won’t go away soon.
And yes, I know, wrench-turners aren’t cross-trained, but still. When you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, you grab what is at hand.
hard pressed puma crews? and where are the pumas deployed to apart from benson! I’m speaking as someonewho did 8 years at an aircraft workshop, we had navy guys on attachment due to the lynx being with both services. The apache is not an aircaft you can just “stick” someone else on which negates your round robin theory, but i do know recently there was a big recruiting drive for technicians from tels/tank systems to retrade to aviation. The REME guys are getting a lot of tours in!!