What a lot of hot air - Mail on Sunday article on the RAF Voyager Force

The Mail on Sunday has delivered a stunning journalistic expose, a mere 10 or so years after the deal was first signed and publicly announced and reported on by the National Audit Office too, highlighting that of the 14 RAF A330 Voyager aircraft, at least three have never been used by the RAF, and that the MOD has apparently wasted £10.5bn on this saga. What a disaster  (link is HERE).

The RAF strategic air transport fleet has long been one of the most important force multipliers going for the UK. In very basic terms the force divides into two main bits – the tactical airlift capability, traditionally filled by the C130 ‘Hercules’ force (that in one variant or another has now served for more than 50 years – or over half the entire existence of the RAF), and the newer A400M ‘Atlas’ transporter. Both of these airframes are used in a variety of predominantly tactical roles including moving cargo and troops short distances and providing support to UK military operations. They are very much the workhorses of the RAF, and it is rare to find an operation that doesn’t have at least one or two airframes on permanent detachment to the region.

The other key role is the strategic airlift fleet, which is operated by two specific aircraft types – the C17 Globemaster and the A330 Voyager. The C17 force was initially acquired on a lease basis as a result of the 1998 SDR, when four aircraft were delivered to form a strategic airlift force. Following heavier than expected use, they were purchased outright and complemented with a further four airframes, taking the total force operated by 99 Squadron to eight aircraft. This force is one of the most heavily tasked in the RAF, operating a range of missions from major airlifting of cargo, through to operating as a troop transport and supporting allied operations – for instance supporting French forces by airlifting their equipment into Mali in 2013.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The genesis of the A330 force came about due to the need to replace two elderly aircraft fleets – the Tristar and the VC10 forces. The VC10 entered service in the 1960s to support movement of troops around the residual empire, and helped herald the end of the much older era of troopships used to send people overseas. Deployed extensively, they were used after the withdrawal East of Suez, and the Defence Reviews of the 1970s that refocused the UK primarily to NATO tasking, as transport aircraft and Air to Air refuelling (AAR) tankers. They were also used in the VIP communications role too. The VC10 force was enlarged during the 1980s to act as a replacement for the Victor tanker force and helped emerge as a key component of the RAF’s ability to conduct AAR. For most of the 1990s and beyond the RAF operated about 14 VC10 airframes.

The Tristar Force entered service in the 1980s in the aftermath of the Falklands War as a means to enhance strategic airlift and air to air refuelling capability, and was heavily used throughout its life. The RAF operated nine airframes in a variety of configurations, including three that were provided with appropriate defensive aids suites to permit them to enter Iraqi and Afghan airspace to transport troops into theatre.

Anyone who deployed on TELIC or HERRICK will be grimly familiar with the experience of flying from Brize Norton on an elderly aircraft, waiting for it to break down at the worst possible moment and then watch as they were either stuck in the Gateway Hotel, or somewhere down range, or worst of all, stuck in Basra or Bastion waiting to go on leave and watching their leave entitlement count down while they waited for a serviceable aircraft to arrive.

The last few years of the aircrafts life saw it pushed to the absolute limits of serviceability, and it is often forgotten that the UK effort in Iraq and Afghanistan depended in no small part on the extreme efforts of the engineers and support crew at Brize Norton, who worked incredibly hard to keep these ageing airframes serviceable and most importantly safe to operate in and out of a warzone where a credible ground to air threat existed.

Replacing the Legions

When attention was first being paid to replacing the Tristar and VC10 forces, the key constraint was the lack of money to do so and purchase planes upfront. The need for replacement came about in the late 1990s and early 2000s when money was tight, and there were other demands on the defence budget.

To find the capital cost of acquiring a large number of new tanker and transport aircraft meant either scrapping other planned projects, thus reducing front line capability, or buying fewer airframes than were needed to do the job properly – not only would that option reduce our wider defence capability, but would also in 20-30 years provide a much smaller pool of planes to draw on as serviceability rates dropped.

The only alternative was to do something new and instead of purchasing a platform, contract out and purchase a service. In other words, the RAF worked out what its requirements were likely to be for supporting air to air refuelling, strategic airlift and other operations for the next 30 years. They identified what level of support they’d need in normal routines, in a crisis where surge capacity was needed and then identified what this totalled up to be (e.g. X hours / days availability per year to deliver the capability). Having worked out what they needed, they then set industry the task of offering a solution.

The outcome was a genuinely novel system whereby the RAF contracted Air Tanker to provide its requirements, and in turn the company undertook to provide sufficient aircraft to meet these needs, at guaranteed and contractually enforceable availability rates for the next 30 years. The result was an order for leasing a total of 14 A330 aircraft, of which the RAF holds 9 in daily service with a further 5 available as required to support surge operations.  It was agreed that these 5 aircraft could be leased out when required to earn revenue by Air Tanker.

All 14 aircraft are now in service and available for use as required by the RAF, although at present some of the surge force are being leased out to commercial operators in a revenue earning capacity.

Why The OUTRAGE?  

The outrage in the Mail article seems to focus on several key points:

a.       Its disgraceful that the MOD has bought planes it isn’t flying

b.       £10.5bn is a lot of money, think how much we could have bought with this.

c.       We don’t know how much service its seen

d.       Probably something about immigrants taking jobs from cancer causing paedophiles…

In reality this issue is a bit more complex than the Mail has set it out to be.

Firstly, there is a lack of understanding about how this deal is structured. This is not at its heart about purchasing aircraft. It is about purchasing a service – how the contractor provides that service is less important than ensuring that the contractually enforceable service is provided. In simple terms, it doesn’t matter if the contractor decided that the solution was 10 airplanes or 100 – they are the ones deciding how to provide the service they’ve agreed to deliver. How they do it is a matter for the company.

This means that for the requirements placed on them by the RAF, then at present they need nine aircraft to do this, but know that they may be required to provide an extra five, often at very short notice.  This is no different to how the RAF would have operated these aircraft had it bought them outright, as any purchase would have had to consider everything from normal daily operations through to supporting airstrikes in the Middle East.

The key difference though is that the RAF (and by extension the taxpayer) has to pay the cost of buying enough planes upfront and then through the life to keep meeting these targets. This was why there was a combined Tristar/VC10 force of nearly 30 aircraft, as it took that many to meet similar levels of availability, reliability and delivery as the current force of 14 A330.

When these aircraft weren’t in use, they were effectively ‘dead weight’ – they had been paid for by the taxpayer, but there was no way of getting a return on that investment. If there was no tasking for them, then they say at Brize Norton waiting for a role – deprecating in value, costing a fortune in maintenance and eating into scare defence budget funds to remain serviceable and airworthy. By contrast the Airtanker fleet only provides aircraft to meet the daily needs of the RAF which only pays for the service that it gets and uses.

The remaining five aircraft are free to be used in revenue earning operations partly because the RAF doesn’t need them right now (but may need them at very short notice), and partly because if they are leased out to Thomas Cook Airlines, then this is revenue coming in which reduces the overall cost of the bill to the taxpayer.

In other words, these aircraft scandalously on hire to Thomas Cook are actively saving the taxpayer an awful lot of money, for no loss of military capability. If they’d been in service RAF aircraft then they’d have been paid for, but not have a means of recouping the cost.

A similar model has been used elsewhere with the Strategic RORO ferry force (the POINT class), whereby of the original six hulls, two were held at contingency and used for revenue earning elsewhere, reducing the overall PFI costs for the public, and also ensuring availability if required (these two ships were later disposed of out of the contract due to reduced requirements). By contrast had these been RN ships, they’d likely have ended up in reserve prior to disposal – an enormous sink of public funds.

The longer term picture is that the A330 fleet is very young and has good availability right now. As it ages and starts to experience the inevitable technical issues that all aircraft have, availability will drop – as seen with the Tristar and VC10 forces. In the latters case, the RAF had nowhere to turn to get help without incurring very expensive alternatives – if an aircraft was U/S, there was nothing that could be done to force someone to continue to deliver the commitment while it was fixed.

The big difference with the Airtanker PFI is that the risk is held by Airtanker and not the RAF. They have contracted for guaranteed availability for decades to come – and this is regardless of how old the airframes get. As the years go by, it will be down to Airtanker to work out how to meet the availability constraints, whether this is by drawing all five ‘spare’ aircraft back into RAF service to ensure 9 are always available, or buying additional airframes is up to them. The fact is the RAF have purchased a service, not an aircraft type.

In 20 years time it may well emerge to have been a very wise move to not hold ownership of an ageing force of high hours transport aircraft, when trying to deliver a strategic airlift force, and to instead make the contractor worry about providing the solution at risk of significant financial penalties if they fail.

Operations & ‘Blair Force One’

There was some criticism in the article for the idea that the Mail couldn’t work out how much service the aircraft had seen. So far the A330 has been in operational service for about five years, and has been deployed in the usual roles that its predecessors filled – namely acting as an trooping aircraft on the routine lifts between the UK and our permanent overseas bases (Germany, Cyprus, Canada, Falkland Islands) and supporting deployments on exercises, where troops need to be moved in large numbers to an operation.

Its also been used to move troops to the Middle East and beyond supporting UK operations in the region. The force has been operationally deployed for years supporting OP SHADER and UK military operations in Iraq and Syria, and  continues to deploy globally – for instance one is permanently based in the Falkland Islands. Most recently the Voyager force earned the record for the longest ever RAF flight, deploying from Brize Norton to Argentina carrying members of the Royal Navy submarine parachute rescue team in their efforts to help support the crew of the San Juan.

Closer to home the Voyager force is on permanent readiness to support ‘QRA’ operations when the Typhoon force is launched to investigate unexpected aircraft heading towards UK airspace – a commitment that requires long thankless hours of readiness ahead of a short notice scramble. The Mail on Sunday may sneer, but this is a force that is working globally 24/7 to support UK interests and ensure that British personnel are well supported globally.

There were veiled complaints about the refit cost to turn one of the aircraft into a VVIP transport, refitting it with some business class seats and secure communications equipment and other discrete enhancements for the use of members of the Royal Family and senior Ministers. This role is one that was traditionally done by the VC10 force, and was a useful way of ensuring that suitably important delegations could travel safely and securely around the globe, and fly the flag for the UK, rather than relying on short notice charter jets. Given many other much smaller air forces operate a VVIP jet, it hardly seems unreasonable to expect the RAF to do the same.

£350m a week?

The other key misleading theme about the Mails article is the suggestion that somehow the MOD has wasted £10.5bn on this equipment when it could have bought X of other capabilities instead. This is bordering on the world of ‘fantasy fleets’. In 2008 when the contract was signed, the MOD did not have £10.5bn spare change to bring a new airtanker force into service.

In fact, the cost wasn’t £10.5bn for the aircraft at all – a reasonable cost had they been bought outright would likely have been about £1.5bn for the airframes. But, this would have had to have been found in the middle of the nightmare of the equipment programme from 2004 – 2010 when an enormously overstretched budget (the so-called £36bn black hole) needed to be fixed, and there was no spare funding available. Even if the RAF had wanted to order its own force of A330, the money did not exist 10 years ago for them to do so.

The second key issue is that planes require support, maintenance and training – all of this comes from different budgets, and had the RAF chosen to buy its airlift solution, then it would have needed  to find the money for the significant enhancements seen at Brize Norton and elsewhere to support the force – again major drains on a budget that was horribly overdrawn.

The figure of £10.5bn sounds like an eyewatering sum of money, and it is. But its important to put in context what you get for this – the taxpayer has paid for a contractor to provide a through life service for everything from the construction and delivery of 14 brand new airframes and their supporting infrastructure, and every cost associated with their operation for the next 30 years. Broken, its closer to about £350m a year for the next 30 years to ensure the RAF can deliver airpower on a truly global basis. That’s frankly a pretty good deal.

Its worth noting that defence is fundamentally an expensive business – and when you see the whole cost of operating something for 30 years, it can be pretty eyewatering. In much the same way as the headline cost of buying a car is far less than working out the full cost of running it for its life (e.g. car purchase, petrol, maintenance, MOT, parking zone permit, insurance etc), defence assets always look more expensive when you see the full cost figure. But suggesting that the MOD has wasted money is just not accurate – had the aircraft been purchased for the RAF, they’d still have cost about £10.5bn to operate anyway over 30 years, and with no opportunity to reduce that bill by chartering out surplus capacity when not needed.

The alternative options are not that good. We could have bought a few new airframes and eked out the life of the older Tristars and VC10s for a few more years – the US Air Force is doing that with its KC135 force, which is on track to be flying some airframes that will be 80 years old in 2040, and where the replacement programme for the new tanker (Pegasus) is a drawn out tortuous development that has taken years to make any progress.

It is easy now in 2018 to sit back and go ‘You paid HOW much?’ for a capability. The problem is that this doesn’t taken account of the financial position 10-15 years ago, and how it really boiled down to a case of saying ‘either we PFI this, or we get out of the strategic AAR business altogether’.

Summing Up

One of the reasons that the RAF stands out from its peers is the wide range of capabilities that it possess. A real jewel in the crown of the force is not only its ISTAR platforms, but also its air mobility force, because they function as real force enablers. To our peer allies, the RAF can offer up the means of supporting their international deployments (e.g. by transporting troops and equipment), thus increasing the likelihood of other countries taking part in peacekeeping missions.

To the US our AAR / air mobility force matters because it has historically supported refuelling of their aircraft (noting though that at present some US aircraft cannot receive fuel due to the lack of a boom on the A330), and because they know that if the UK deploys, it is able to turn up and operate without requiring support from US enablers.

This sort of investment may not be as glamorous as buying additional F35 or Typhoon, but what it does do is guarantee global reach, enhances our reputation with our allies and ensures that the UK is seen as an influential coalition partner of choice, able to operate across a range of areas and capabilities on a global basis – one of only a tiny handful of air forces that can do this.

The ‘so-what’ then seems to be that the MOD has been attacked by the Mail on Sunday for the audacious crime of buying a world class aircraft to ensure the RAF continue to operate globally in support of British interests, and that it has been able to try and secure maximum value for money by ensuring the contract in place allows for revenue to be earned on spare capacity to reduce the bill and save the taxpayers money. Colour me outraged…

SH, pinstripedline@gmail.com