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Re: C4 9pm
Posted: 23 Jan 2012, 15:13
by tonymadge
You will have to come and fly with us one shift. I guess now we are regional and soon to be under NPAS??? recruiting will be from all forces. But thats another year away and I should be long gone then.
Re: C4 9pm
Posted: 23 Jan 2012, 16:04
by thehappyotter
I'd love to come and see how another unit works. There was rumour of another (backup?) aircraft being based at Ripley too once it goes national but I'm not sure how true that is.
I've only got 21 years to go... Plenty of time...
Re: C4 9pm
Posted: 23 Jan 2012, 17:22
by DaveB
I've only got 21 years to go... Plenty of time...
Good God Rob.. if I thought I still had another 21 years to work.. I'd stay in bed and drift into oblivion
BTW.. do you have your own driving school up there or are they regional too? Reason I ask.. my cousins partner was recently the head honcho of advanced driving on the Leicester force. He'd done his time so had to leave but in the interim, the force made the job a civvie post so he applied and got it back again
Some folks have a habit of walking into things don't they
ATB
DaveB
Re: C4 9pm
Posted: 23 Jan 2012, 18:42
by thehappyotter
We do have our own school Dave but it's a real shadow of its former self.
It used to be mainly police officer staffed, with 6 or 7 real quality and experienced instructors (both car and bike) and it's own fleet of marked & unmarked vehicles of various performance levels.
It's now got 3 or 4 civvy instructors (not that I'm questioning their quality, most are ex-officer instructors) and hardly any vehicles, you have to blag, beg or borrow one and take it with you most of the time.
It used to run from Epperstone Manor. A beautiful country estate left to the force after the second world war in a will. Now flogged of for peanuts and moved to a non-descript industrial unit with no parking and hardly any heating.
There is very much an element of 'jobs for the boys' in the driving school world. I think partly with good reason, it's a very skilled job which requires lots of experience which is difficult to get in the civvy world. There aren't many civilian driving instructors with decades of blue light driving experience out there. Due to that they tend to stay for a long time, the instructor who taught my dad in 1982 was the exact same guy who took me for my Grade One exam drive in 2006!