Jonesey,
Two-and-a-half squadrons per QRA base, basically, with about half a squadron tied up down south, because the best part of a Squadron will be taking the Falklands commitment on a rotational basis.
Because it’s not just two aircraft, it’s two aircraft plus their replacements (how many Q jets might you scramble – back in the day it was by no means uncommon for a fourth Northern QRA pair to get airborne within one 24 hour period…..).
In days gone by, it was found that a single ‘Bear’ could tie up as many as 20 Lightning QRA sorties, and if four ‘Bears’ came in sequence (or all popped up from low level from different points of the compass), the UK could soon be run out of fighters.
And how often do you want QRA to ‘come around’ for your pilots? If you have 18 CR/LCR pilots per squadron, two on QRA at a time, QRA will be coming around for one day in nine, assuming that the boss, the XO, the QWIs et al all take their share, and ignoring the fact that several crews will be ‘down South’. And then there’ll be the days they’re nominated as Q3/Q4, ready to take over if Q1 and Q2 are scrambled.
It’s a 24 hour duty, too, so they’re not going to be working a normal working day the next day.
You quickly find that while a squadron is standing Q, it really can’t do much else. And if you’ve given your fighter squadrons a capable multi role Typhoon, you’re going to want them to be doing all sorts of training and maintaining all sorts of currencies.
In Cold War days, it became clear that one QRA commitment was best shared between two airfields, each with two squadrons – Leeming and Leuchars doing Northern Q, Binbrook and Wattisham Southern.
It takes five squadrons to do QRA to a certain level, assuming a particular level of threat. If you wanted to be able to tackle a larger number of simultaneous threats, or a carefully co-ordinated succession of feinting threats, you’d need twice that number, or three times.
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