How the hell does someone steal a Fuselage?

Just about every engineer I've known comes out the RAF with a full kitted out tool kit. Tens of thousands worth of gear they order up through stores, bung the storeman a few quid and steal the lot before they leave.

So you can bet electrical items go the same way.
 
dannyjo22 said:
Just about every engineer I've known comes out the RAF with a full kitted out tool kit.
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I second that.

The bridge I'm not surprised at, I've heard of groups of people try to steal the bridges on the plain.

Studying lean engineering you do tend to hear that the MoD are incredibly wasteful and careless, that goes for AWE and BAE as well.
 
rypt said:
How do you steal a bridge?
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I remember my dad telling me that one day the footbridge to the back of the factory he worked in just disappeared, turns out a gang decided it was worth enough money for a few of them to work through the night and dismantle it.
 
We've lost worse than that before, a type 42 destroyer, Chieften tank, but these things aren't really lost just misplaced they will turn up (and did). We do have to sign for the equipment we're responsible for and get billed for it if we lose it.
 
Morbius said:
They pay well over the odds for their contracts as well. Private companies pay much less for identical equipment.
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Yes a company I worked for used to book just about everyone to the military contracts as they were paid by man hour worked, even when you were not even working in the same building as the military contract or working on civilian contracts.

Some of us were booked for over a year on jobs we were not even working on. How the hell that never got picked up by the MOD god only knows. People must be taking back handers all over the place.
 
Morbius said:
They pay well over the odds for their contracts as well. Private companies pay much less for identical equipment.
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This is so true. Here are a couple of examples of my "wasteful" dealings with the MOD through my life.

1. A warehouse full of out of date fertiliser. First problem is why order so much that you end up with it going out of date? But more importantly they rang us to dispose of it and paid us £60,000 to remove it. We sold it to an agricultural fertiliser company for £20,000 and that included them going to collect it. Net gain to us for a few phone calls £80,000. Aparantly they had to dispose of it to a legally authorised disposal company (us) and were not allowed to sell it.:confused:

2. When the Iraq war kicked off they had desperate need for articulated tankers to carry water. These were really milk tankers as they were insulated to help keep the water cool. They immediately did a deal with our competitors and hired from them (without shopping around). They signed a contract which stated the vehicles had to be off hired in the same condition as they took them (fair enough, standard hire) but the first thing they did was paint the shiny polished tankers with camoflague paint. This then cost £8,000 per tanker to replace when they were returned. The contract also said any lost tankers were new for old so despite the tankers that they hired were very old and worth about £12,000 each, they lost lots (as you can imagine) and had to pay out £40,000 for each one lost. Lastly all the tankers they hired were on alloy wheels which everybody in the tanker game knows is no good on the Iraqi roads and with the sand so they were shipping out thousands of pounds worth of alloy wheels every month to keep these tankers on the road.
 
Greebo said:
1. A warehouse full of out of date fertiliser. First problem is why order so much that you end up with it going out of date? But more importantly they rang us to dispose of it and paid us £60,000 to remove it. We sold it to an agricultural fertiliser company for £20,000 and that included them going to collect it. Net gain to us for a few phone calls £80,000. Aparantly they had to dispose of it to a legally authorised disposal company (us) and were not allowed to sell it.:confused:
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They make tax evasion ethical.
 
A plane fuselage, a ship's anchor and a clarinet are among items which have been stolen from the Ministry of Defence since May.
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Thief is probably as high as kite, he's left them all at sea, and he'll soon have to face the music.
 
Ahleckz said:
Glasgow Council has lost a steam train. It's somewhere in the city, but they don't know where. Madness.
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Come again? A steam train? It's not exactly inconspicuous now is it? And there's presumably only a limited number of places it can possibly be due to the necessity of moving on the train tracks...

Still that's an impressively long list and yet I find myself slightly shrugging without knowing more context - it's got to be a list of things that are simply missing, some may have been stolen and some will have doubtless been misplaced. While carelessness to such levels isn't particularly great it does seem slightly better than suggesting we've got a sizeable problem with thefts - yet at the same time look at the defence budget and look at the percentage this constitutes, we're not even talking 1%, in fact if the military defence budget is ~£33 billion then we're barely talking fractions of a percent.
 
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