MOD seeks parachute packing & maintenance services

Airborne’s sound. He can take a bit of banter, and doesn’t need a silly little fanboy fighting his battles for him.

Hello Chris, thanks for the support but Dern is ripping it out of me, as he is probably drunk after 2 shandies, which is acceptable, after being in the RLC bath and laundry unit for a year or so…..but he is on the ball and it’s just banter! 👍

Hate to break it to you old chum, but Batmen are no longer issued.

Another ‘advantage’ is that it takes service personnel off the books and saves capitation costs ie allowing defence manpower cuts. I doubt the non-financial ie operational benefits of keeping those military personnel are ever considered.
Good point about MoD invariably keeping the financial risk – crazy.

Of course it’s cheaper! On pure staffing costs alone you don’t need to recruit, train, house, feed, care for or manage the staff involved. Nor do you need to provide, procure, maintain the equipment and buildings used, and finally the inventory is on the contractors inventory and not yours!

I know, I hate it.

I started jumping when I was 16 as part of a sponsored jump for a lass at college who had Leukaemia. This was from a jump school at a little airfield in North Cornwall, which was fairly close to the coast. So had awesome views from 1500ft. The aircraft was a diddy little Cessna 180 I think. Where you could get about 5 people in the back. On the port side of the aircraft, there was a platform over the wheel, which you put you foot on and a cross bar that you held onto. When the instructor said go, you let go of the cross bar and fell back and down, initially in the free fall position, screaming out 1000, 2000, 3000, check canopy! Hence why the arm was out of position causing the spin. As a full on weirdo, I actually enjoyed jumping and signed up for more. Though at this stage they were all with steerable round canopies and 1 to 5 second static lines. By the time I left college had done around 30 jumps, it wasn’t cheap, especially for a college brat.

After signing-up, initially didn’t do any jumps. Though started again after two years. But had to “requalify” through Weston-on-the-Green. Starting with the school at Brize, then balloon jump, followed by the Skyvan at Weston. I don’t know why, but jumping through the floor hatch in the balloon, was far worse, than releasing the white knuckles on the Cessna.

I must admit, went a bit wild in my 20’s with parachuting, being free fall qualified, doing both night jumps and extreme weather jumps, though no base jumping. Mostly did HALO/HAHO later on including the squirrel suit. Have a mate who survived a double canopy failure, when we were jumping in the States. He luckily had just enough canvas to slow him down just enough. Though smashed his legs and pelvis, having to relearn how to walk after being in traction for 6 months. It was one of the worse things to witness from the ground, knowing you couldn’t do anything to help! I know what you mean about the American method, as we noticed how many of them had twisted lines after jumping. But also noticed that they also had significantly more landing injuries that we did.

1of2 .British officials note that Sunak appeared at the Munich security conference in February and has held five phone calls and four face-to-face meetings with Scholz on the sidelines of various international summits this year.
The next-generation combat aircraft decision is closely linked to a British-German wrangle over a delivery of 48 Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Saudi Arabia, in a package potentially worth more than £5 billion.
The jet aircraft are jointly manufactured by Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, which means Berlin has the ability to block their export. It has done so up to now on the grounds that a Saudi-led coalition has been blamed for killing thousands of civilians in the Yemeni civil war.
In September this newspaper reported that Sunak and James Cleverly, the British foreign secretary, were at the heart of a concerted lobbying campaign to try to shift Germany’s position.
The UK regards Saudi Arabia as a valuable partner in efforts to stabilise the Middle East and hopes the sale will safeguard thousands of jobs at the BAE Systems factories that manufacture Eurofighter components and assemble the jets. The matter is expected to come to a head in the next few weeks, after Saudi Arabia heaped pressure on the UK and Germany by inviting France to set out a rival offer to deliver its own Dassault Rafale fighter aircraft.
Sources across Scholz’s three-party coalition say they are now increasingly confident that the Eurofighter sale will be unblocked in the near future. This is partly because the chancellor worries that prospective partners will shy away from entering multinational defence projects with Germany in future if it is seen to be single-handedly thwarting exports.
Berlin is also conscious that the jet’s manufacturers, including Airbus in Germany, need the extra orders to protect jobs and keep their industrial capacity ticking over. A fortnight ago Guillaume Faury, Airbus’s chief executive, took the unusual step of explicitly criticising the German government for blocking the Eurofighter deal, describing its restrictive approach to arms exports as a “serious problem” and “very negative”.
Faury also argued that it raised questions about whether allies could treat Germany as a “trustworthy partner”. However, there are two factors complicating the decision for Scholz. The first is that there is still some opposition to the deal within his coalition, primarily from sections of the Green Party but also from a number of MPs in the chancellor’s own Social Democratic Party.
One MP in the coalition said that leading figures on the Green party’s Realo [pragmatist] wing such as Robert Habeck, the vice-chancellor and business minister responsible for arms export controls, wanted to lift the veto. However, other influential Green politicians continue to argue that sending arms to Saudi Arabia is not only immoral but dangerous, because those weapons could one day be used against the West’s interests.
The second problem is the Israel-Hamas conflict. Germany has positioned itself squarely on Israel’s side and sources say the government would prefer to wait and see how Saudi Arabia positions itself before Berlin takes any decision on weapons deliveries.
Analysis
The relationship between Britain, France and Germany, western Europe’s three foremost military powers, is coming to resemble one of the unfortunate love triangles from nouvelle vague cinema (Oliver Moody writes).
Paris and Berlin, like a wearily long-married couple, have gone from renewing their vows and embarking on expensive joint projects to ritualised bickering and mutual backbiting.
Once French presidents and German chancellors used to hold hands in public and help each other out in domestic elections. Now they squabble over everything from nuclear reactors and missile defence to the choreography of China trips and shared cabinet meetings.
Notionally the pair are committed to working together on two swishy advanced weapons projects — the Main Ground Combat System (MGCS) tank and the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) jet — that are meant to provide the backbone of the continent’s future armed forces.
But Germany’s eye is straying as the chancellery becomes increasingly exasperated with what it sees as France’s inordinately jealous coddling of its own defence industry.
First Berlin hinted a few weeks ago that it was thinking about upping sticks and developing a next-generation tank with Italy, Spain and Sweden instead. Now it is signalling that it could join Britain, Italy and Japan’s fighter jet programme too.
Allies of Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, say he regards the UK as a more straightforward partner on this issue than France, but also feels slighted and frustrated by the lack of high-level engagement from London — and in particular by Rishi Sunak’s failure to visit him in Berlin.
Ultimately, though, the strongest driving force here is not so much amour-propre or schadenfreude as the logic of industrial consolidation. Germany is understood to see little point in European states pouring tens of billions into competing marquee defence projects when they could more efficiently join forces instead