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Cadet
instructors go back to basics
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Flight
Lieutenant Kevin Kerr (AAFC) and Flying Officer Bob Carroll
(AAFC) supervise 17-year-old Cadet Corporal Angela Warren-Brown.
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THE
fresh-faced Air Force Cadets who come together during the school
holidays to participate in a series of technical trade courses at
RAAF Base Wagga couldn’t be in safer hands.
Two of their instructors, Flying Officer (AAFC) Bob Carroll and
Flight Lieutenant Kevin Kerr (AAFC), have a combined total of 70
years’ experience in the field they are teaching.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bob and Kevin, both teenagers
fresh out of school, began Air Force apprenticeships in what was
then known as Basic Fitting.
Basic Fitting was a course designed to equip graduates with the
skills required to use metals tools, drills, files and the like.
More than 40 years later, both are cadet trainers teaching today’s
15 and 16-year-olds exactly the same skills.
The name of the course may be different – it’s now called
General Engineering Training, part of Aircraft Trade Training –
but, according to Bob, the skills and tools being used have hardly
changed in more than four decades.
“Over the years we’ve been running into each other at
these training courses at Wagga, but it only recently dawned on
us that here we were with 70 years’ experience teaching young
people the same things we learned as apprentices in the 1950s and
1960s,” Bob said
The Air Force has been a big part of Bob’s life. After finishing
his apprenticeship, he went on to work as an instrument fitter with
RAAF Base Williamtown’s old No. 81 Fighter Wing.
“My years in uniform have been the best years of my life,”
he said.
Kevin, meantime, completed an engineering diploma after his apprenticeship
and left the Permanent Air Force as a Squadron Leader in the 1980s.
But since being reunited as Officers in the Australian Air Force
Cadets, the pair couldn’t be happier with the role they are
playing in shaping the Air Force personnel and skilled tradespeople
of the future.
“We both gravitated towards it because it was an area we knew,”
Bob said.
“These young people, who come here to train in their own time,
have their tails up and are really trying to better themselves.”
And the coincidences don’t end with the reunion of Bob and
Kevin.
Squadron Leader Doug Oliver, who runs the courses at Wagga, was
a Corporal Instructor at Williamtown in Bob’s early days as
a cadet at the base with No. 16 Flight.
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