Painting The Sky Red? Thoughts on the RAF VIP Voyager Paint Job.

The MOD has reportedly spent £900k repainting an RAF A330 Voyager jet to have a new paint scheme. The jet, which was modified internally some years ago to act as a long range VIP transport is now to have an external paint scheme that is separate from the rest of the core Voyager fleet.

This has caused the perfect storm of headlines, with the news breaking on a day when all manner of other damning headlines about free school meals were making news. It is the perfect sum of money to write about – its small enough to be comprehensible, big enough to seem large – people can look at £900k and go ‘but that’s three times my mortgage on a lick of paint’. This makes it a great story to write about – the combination of scandal, comprehensible sums of money and the hint of wasted public funds.

Is it something that we should worry about though? To be honest, no, not it is not.

All aircraft need to be painted – it is a fact of life that if you don’t paint an airframe, it will quickly deteriorate. There was an excellent article a few days ago in the drive.com website about a mysterious US government 737 jet that hasn’t been painted, and how it was already deteriorating without paint.

We have to assume then that this aircraft requires painting as part of routine operational maintenance. On a day to day basis the RAF has 9 A330 Voyager aircraft in service, and a further 5 leased out but available via the Air Tanker consortium. They all require routine servicing and maintenance, and they all require painting.

If we assume then that the aircraft was going to require painting anyway, the better question to ask is not ‘how much did this cost’ but ‘how much did this cost compared to what a normal paint job would be’. If the normal paint job is £100k, and the new one is £900k then there is definitely something interesting to look into here – but if the cost is similar, then is this actually an issue?

The second question to ask is ‘is the cost covered as part of the Air Tanker contract? Under the terms of the PFI, the MOD has essentially contracted out to Air Tanker to provide a capability that can be called on over an enduring period of time at a guaranteed level of availability.

Unlike the previous generation of jets, the much loved but ancient Tristars and Voyagers, for which the RAF owned but had no contract for service delivery, the MOD has essentially required Air Tanker to work out what it needs to provide in order to ensure a sustained cover for the next few decades, and then let it provide airframes as required.

The contract seems expensive, but that’s because it covers the full cost of providing this service for a very long time, and if you totalled up just how expensive the previous fleets were, you’d probably get (adjusted for inflation) a not dissimilar sum of money, if not more compared to what the current service provides.

What isn’t clear is whether the contract payments cover paint jobs, or departures from agreed schemes, and how this is paid for. If the answer is that the MOD is paying anyway as part of the contract for the paint job, then again its hard to see what the issue is here – these aircraft need painting, MOD has agreed to pay for it, and the cost is £X – whether the colour is battleship grey or Austin Powers psychedelic schemes, it makes little difference.

Until it is possible to understand the funding structure for the painting arrangements, then it is equally hard to pass judgement on whether this represents a good, or bad, deal for the taxpayer.

There is perhaps a risk here that amidst the reporting we forget that the RAF has a long history of painting its jets different colours. One only has to look at the multitude of different paint schemes that various aircraft have shipped to realise that this is not new – airframes rarely carry the same identical paint scheme forever, and over time will change and evolve it.

What is hard to find online are the costs the RAF has paid over the years for new paint schemes – again this may be worth looking into to understand the scale of the cost paid and whether it is, relatively speaking, a good or bad sum of money.

What isn’t clear though is who actually asked for the paint scheme to be changed? While the Prime Minister is coming under attack for it to happen, the chances of the PM or his staff personally intervening with the MOD to insist that the VIP transport aircraft be repainted are, realistically, fairly small.

Its not clear whether this was always planned since the airframe was rerolled a few years ago, and if so, that it is just sheer bad timing. Or was it a case that part of the RAF or MOD decided that with the airframe coming into maintenance, now would be a good time to do this – the likelihood of No10 directly intervening to require a repaint seems very slim indeed.

This may be a good question to ask – who requested the change, identified the requirement and at what level was it approved? Was it normal working level, did it go up the military hierarchy or was it sent to Ministers for consideration and approval, and was No10s views sought about it, and if so, how did they respond?

What is perhaps of far more interest is the question around the airframe itself and its future utilisation. If the airframe has been repainted in this way, does this indicate a near permanent move into the VIP transport role and if so, will another airframe be brought into use from the remaining fleet of 5 aircraft not currently in RAF use – indications on the internet are that at least one airframe is currently free for use. At least £10m was spent converting this airframe  to VIP use in the first place, so this extra paint scheme is still a very small part of the overall cost.

The final question we perhaps all need to ask ourselves is a simple one. Why do we as a nation get so hung up on the idea that we spend money on things like VIP transports? There is no doubt senior leaders need to travel, and that they require the ability to do so safely and securely.

Humphrey does not for one moment begrudge the existence of a VIP transport fleet – both the Voyager and the smaller BAE146 types as well. He would much rather senior Ministers spent their time constructively doing their jobs with access to a flat bed seat, rather than waiting in a random airport for a connecting flight and then slumming it in economy class before arriving home tired and frustrated, ahead of a long day in which they’ll need to take decisions that could cost billons of pounds, or potentially the taking of human life.

We seem to get hot under the collar at the idea of allowing our Ministers access to a level of transport comfort that far less senior business people receive, or that actually they can have access to an aircraft that gets them to their meeting on time, and not spending hours waiting around not doing their jobs.

We also need to ask why we allow ourselves to get worked up about a paint scheme – no one complains when we repaint a Typhoon in 1944 invasion colours, or a tailplane on an aircraft to commemorate an event or historic period. Almost every country in the world has a VIP transport aircraft force, many far more numerous and plush than the RAF’s and yet the UK seems alone in almost feeling guilty about advertising the fact that its aircraft is from the UK.

There is nothing instinctively wrong with having an aircraft painted to reflect the national colours. If the airframe was due a repainting anyway, and the additional cost is minimal, perhaps we should embrace this as an opportunity to be proud of what our country is, not see it as a chance to don sackcloth and ashes. Hopefully the new aircraft will emerge soon enough, and the story will move on, but it is perhaps a shame that what should be a period of pride in an aircraft flying our national colours has somehow become a slightly murky opportunity for political point scoring.