Astonishingly, because it was a training unit, 208 Squadron had no Adjutant or Ops Support staff. All admin was done by the Squadron pilots, thus taking them away from their primary task. We therefore introduced some administrative support (a full-time Adjutant) and more operational support (2 Ops Support SNCOs), much to the delight of the QFIs,
who could therefore spend more time in the cockpit and less time on ‘secondary duties’. We even employed the Ops SNCOs to write the flying programme (33), which was a huge leap of faith, but which was extremely successful and released the duty programmer to fly up to 2 additional sorties per day.
We re-negotiated 
the engineering contract. Historically, rectification had been done at night to provide 18 aircraft serviceable at 08:00 for a 5-wave day. However, unserviceabilites reduced the availability throughout the day, so we rarely were able to fly the 84 sortie target. However, changing the rectification pattern to provide a steady flow of aircraft (34) at a rate of 9 per hour solved this issue. After all, we only needed 1 aircraft serviceable at 08:00, as long as the others followed.
The Squadron building was extended (although not by nearly enough) to accommodate the 108 aircrew that were ‘on the books’! But, most significantly, we looked at the flying programme which, with 84 sorties, thus 168 pairings of over 100 aircrew, plus simulators and supervisory duties, had become too much for the human brain to encapsulate, and we were losing a number of sorties because of the inevitable errors that crept in. For example: pilots were programmed to fly when they were absent (for example, at medical appointments) and often too close to the previous sortie so that they could not make the next take off time. We 
searched for a computer-based solution, but realised that it is impossible to write a computer programme to write a flying programme, because most of our variables are infinitely variable. What we did find, however, (and it is thanks to Sqn Ldr Dave Lord for his outstanding research) was a programme called ‘Flight Pro’ (by an Australian company called ‘Ocean’) (35) that could easily identify and show us where the errors were, thus allowing us quickly to rectify them. My estimate was that this one factor alone saved us approximately 5 sorties per day that would otherwise have been lost.
