Defence
ATAC is also offering a range of ex-military jets including the Israeli Kfir.
D arren O livier
OUTSOURCING AIR FORCE TRAINING Late last year, the United States Air Force awarded seven separate companies components of a massive multi-year US$ 6.4 billion contract for the provision of ‘Red Air’ adversary air combat training. There are useful lessons to be learned for Africa.
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HILE notable for its size, ‘Red Air’ was an expected development in a long-term trend. Air forces around the world are outsourcing increasing levels of their training and support functions, as doing it all in-house has become ever more financially nonviable. For African air forces this may be a far more cost-effective solution than inhouse training. The question arises: How useful is outsourcing training, and how far can it go? Outsourcing of military support tasks to the private sector has been around for decades, but saw much more widespread adoption after the end of the Cold War as NATO air forces had to adjust to steep cuts in defence spending and transitions away from conscript forces. The first functions
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FlightCom Magazine
to be outsourced were low-level tasks that were obviously more cheaply done by the private sector such as facilities cleaning and catering. But before long, air forces began integrating the private sector into ever more high-level support tasks, including aircraft and other systems maintenance. These days it’s difficult to find a western air force that hasn’t outsourced parts of its aircraft maintenance process. It has increasingly become more cost-efficient to focus in-house military maintenance capabilities at the organisational and intermediate levels, which require more common and easily trainable skills, rather than at the depot level which requires rarer skills and capabilities. That helps resolve one of the biggest struggles of any allvolunteer air force, which is training up and then keeping personnel who are highly skilled in a certain specific area and would
earn far more in the private sector. The approach is not without its risks though. The Royal Air Force (RAF) for instance contracted the engineering arm of Flybe, the regional British airline, to perform depot-level maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) support at Brize Norton air base for its fleet of Airbus Military A400M transport aircraft. Now that Flybe has entered liquidation that support contract is at risk, causing sleepless nights within RAF Transport Command while they wait to see how the liquidation will turn out and whether another company will buy out Flybe’s engineering business and continue the contract. Despite risks like these, the RAF has extended outsourcing even to operational support functions like air crew training and aerial tanker support over the past two decades. Unlike other air forces which have contracted private aerial tanker operators like Omega only to supplement their own fleets, the RAF relies entirely on the Voyager aerial tankers of the AirTanker consortium and no longer maintains its own in-house fleet. It’s quite an elegant solution, with all the pilots being trained as RAF Reservists despite being employed by AirTanker and the aircraft being dual-
