And 3 or 4 Canberra class as the Navy’s new capital ships, instead of CVF, replacing the Invincibles and most of the amphib. ships too.

I can see a lot of political opposition to the civil servants thing; such middlemen thrive over the bureaucracy in the defence sector.

I assume the rotary fleet will be reduced to something like the Joint Harrier Force, with all three services sharing a common pool of helicopters?

Is there any good reason why the RAF should operate helicopters?

Five Reims-Cessna FR172s still in service with the Irish Air Corps

See http://www.military.ie/aircorps/fleet/cessna/index.htm for details.

Actually, i was astonished to find out that the Gazelle planned retirement date is 2018.

They could very well be retired tomorrow in the morning, sincerely, since retiring any other kind would be far worse a lose.

While 22 Puma are set for an over 200 millions upgrade to stay in service up to the 2020, until the SDSR EVENTUALLY changes that labour decision for something else. As i already said, i’m certainly in favor of dropping the upgrade and Puma in exchange for new Merlin airframes.

The ultimate objective, though, is and should be to plan a future rotorcraft fleet centered on Chinooks, Wildcats and Merlins. Adding any other fleet to support and to train people for would be a waste of money that the MOD simply CAN’T afford.

The Gazelles are already disappearing. The current plan is that they’ll all be gone by 2018. Maybe that will be accelerated by the SDSR.

The Army needs a light/medium utility helicopter, something in the Blackhawk class, to replace the Puma. (NH90 would do nicely, but that’s not going to happen; Blackhawks maybe, or something basic like the AW139, or the AW149 if it ever actually happens, any of which would presumably be made by Westland.)

Chinooks and Merlins are too big sometimes, or their size isn’t required, and the Lynx Wildcat is too small, in terms of troop-carrying capacity. As mentioned earlier, the latest Super Lynx would probably meet most of the the Navy’s requirement.

Is there a need for the RAF to operate smaller tactical transport aircraft – such as the C-27J or the CASA CN-235/C-295 – to supplement bigger types like the Hercules and A400M (when it arrives)?

The deletion of the Puma and Gazelle fleets would be the most sensible options.
Scrapping the Wildcats would be a disaster: most of the FAA and AAC fleets of choppers depend heavily on the Future Lynx and cutting them would mean destroying almost completely both fleets as the current Lynx begin phasing out in 2014 if not even earlier.

The deletion of Sea King is something the RN hoped to do years ago when it asked/planned for 66 Merlins to cover all roles. This was not done back then, but it could certainly be done in a few years time now, by having as was already planned under labour the Merlins go to the navy.
The SAR service contract should be fixed in some way, though, to allow Sea King to truly bow out.
It would take a few years to get new choppers in service for the role, and hopefully they would not be S92 as it had been suggested. Adding another fleet to support would largely erase the savings obtained by phasing out Sea Kings. It would just replace a problem with another.
It would make more sense to center the PFI on Merlin choppers: the unit cost, i think, won’t be much different, and the savings can be obtained in training/support/logistics.

Any numeric reduction to the already overstretched Wildcat, Merlin and Apache fleets would be a total disaster, though, and it is an option to avoid at all costs.

The Gazelles are on the way out anyway, the Pumas should go too, but so should the Lynx Wildcat, at least for the Army. The battlefield reconnaissance role is or will be covered by other ISTAR assets, including UAVs, and the general utility/transport role could better handled by something like an AW139, which can carry twice as many troops as a Wildcat. This would keep work in Westland, and replace the Army’s Pumas and Lynxes.

It isn’t difficult to get 100 sorties a day during high tempo operations.

F-35B is designed to produce 5 to 6 sorties per day in a maximum effort scenario. If only half of the 36 F-35’s flew, that’s 90 to 108 sorties. Additionally, there are helos flying too.

Does that mean that CVF is unnecessarily large?

Yes you need a 65,000 ton carrier if you want to do the 100-sortie-per-day part. If you dont want that then a smaller vessel will suffice. The Carrier Strike requirement stipulates the sortie rate so thats what we get.

Plus, remember, the ship is intended to be reconfigurable to CATOBAR in event F-35B folds or the global threat situation changes some years down the track. Bit hard to reconfigure a 30,000ton CVS to do CATOBAR at meaningful sortie rates.

Where did the 100-sortie-per-day rate requirement come from?