and you think Redhall is inefficient?

4 months on, and with the top brass falling out amongst themselves on the sustainability of this latest escapade by the Boy David, I wondered how the projected £1 billion plus costs were going to be met.

This from SKY News......

Three of the RAF’s most advanced fighter jets are being used for spare parts because of a crippling shortage, Waste Watch can reveal.

The Typhoons – worth more than £360m between them – have been grounded at a time when the planes are carrying out air strikes over Libya.

Although the Ministry of Defence has admitted to the practise, this is the first revelation of how many fighter jets are currently being cannibalised for parts.

Tory MP Chris Heaton-Harris discovered three Typhoons, worth around £120m each, were grounded in March this year (the latest figures available) when he asked a written question in Parliament.

He said: “It’s a disgraceful waste of taxpayers’ money to have £360m sat in the RAF equivalent of a salvage yard providing spares to keep other planes in the air, when spares should have been easily sourced and in the original contract.

“The RAF needs to shake itself out of this Steptoe and Son mentality and sort out their logistics problems once and for all – and Ministers should be leading this process from within.”

The RAF is forced to cannibalise aircraft for spare parts in order to keep the maximum number of Typhoons in the air on any given day.

The Ministry of Defence have warned the problems are likely to continue until 2015, when it expects the supply of spares finally to have reached a “steady state”.

A recent report by the Public Accounts Committee of MPs warned that only eight of the RAF's 48 Typhoon pilots were qualified to carry out ground attacks last year.

Still, if we look on the brightside, when/if we actually manage to drop a missile on Gaddafi rather than civvys, by a lucky coincidence, there's lots of very saleable oil reserves to hand!