Easy,
Thanks for coming back and contributing to a very good thread. I'd like to respond to your point about my 'adjustment of stance'.
i've consistently tended towards a view that the MoD's failures with regards to airworthiness (which are systemic and serious) were, and remain are, driven more by incompetence and ignorance rather than 'malevolence'. I did not and do not believe that anyone seriously set out to deliberately cause deaths and loss of aircraft. However, I do believe that decisions made by senior officers (and senior civil servants) to advance their own careers ('look how many millions of pounds I've saved by transformational change to my PT!') have led directly to those deaths. They continue to happen, and almost certainly contributed to Sean's death.
Where I do support the use of the term 'malevolent' is the ongoing effort to cover the whole issue up. Reputations are blackened, facts are suppressed and lies are told. In my view, that's probably going to be the thing that gets them in the end. Cover-ups usually do.
Incidentally, I clearly remember being briefed on seat pan handle safety on the Mk10 seat in the 90s, with a clear instruction to check that it was fully home before inserting the seat safety pin, and making sure it stayed that way after pin withdrawal. That was risk mitigation happening at the local level.
But here's the REAL point. If the seat HAD had a safety case, the issue of the seat pan handle would have undoubtedly been noted and recorded in the Hazard Log. That hazard would then have been 'sentenced' - that is, investigated, analysed and mitigated, against the extant Safety Case and build standard, with full input from the Design authority. Except, as Tuc would gently point out, the main mechanism for doing this activity (PDS contracts) was effectively cancelled from around 93 onwards. And, as late as 2011, the seat didn't even have a Safety Case, so none of this activity could have taken place anyway.
Hopefully, this one will run and run. Best Regards as ever to those keeping our aircrew safe right now.
Engines