The even fewer

[Paul K]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... e-low.html

With foreign aid ring-fenced, we are probably now spending more on third world air forces than our own.

[Airspeed]

Good point Paul,
really makes us voters wonder what is going on.
House prices are rocketing because foreign nationals are buying.
This was denied last year, but now it's come out that (A) the China stock market woes will take buyers out of the market, and there may be a slump; (B) China has relaxed the rules on their nationals investing overseas, so there will be new buyers pushing our market up; (C) the Aussie $ is likely to plunge to 60-odd US cents, making it easier for the Chinese to pay even higher prices for our real estate.
The Speaker of the House charged taxpayers $5500.00 for a helicopter ride to a party fundraiser. She repaid it after the federal police had been called in. Another Minister spent $80,000 on overseas trips. These are small squanderings compared to the millions that get blown on self promotion, but we apparently have no money for education and public health. And we're paying up-front for "our" F35s which don't exist yet. Japan will probably build "our" new submarines, and will probably be the only ones permitted to do the servicing of them. I'll stop before I explode.

[Scorpius]

When I left the RAF in 1985, we had the following;

Tornado
Phantom
Jaguar
Harrier
Buccaneer
VC10
Tristar
Hercules
Hawk
Chipmunk
Lightning
Nimrod
Shackleton
Chinook
Puma
Gazelle
Canberra
Sea King
Victor
Bulldog

Sorry, arm aches from all this typing so I had to stop.

Nev

[Nigel H-J]

I suppose that the Government might consider contracting out the RAF to an external partner or the highest bidder maybe China, Russia or North Korea? Well, what could be worse than that?

Nigel.

[Scorpius]

The bad news is we are already doing it with Thomas Cook and the spare RAF Voyagers.

[simondix]

Plus the fact with the sourced out training we wont have enough pilots to fly whichever aircraft we haven't scrapped.