Originally Posted by
EAP86
A bit of history may help. In the late 80s early 90s the ADRP commissioned a safety consultancy to review their current safety arrangements and make recommendations. I think the Piper Alpha inquiry had recently found the safety case approach quite compelling and the consultancy recommended MOD take the concept on board. The concept appeared in Def Stan 00-56 around the same time but perhaps wasn't well understood by many. I can recall confusion in PTs and it's perhaps not surprising that each ended up with a different SC approach and format. In hindsight it might be that more time could have been spent on the management of the introduction of the change. I suspect that there are still ongoing issues but that might be another thread.
That's a really excellent point which I'd forgotten about. Being anxious to re-iterate that I have no knowledge whatsoever of what they did/do on Hawk and am only speculating: It's quite possible that Hawk Tmk1a was exempted from some aspects under a "grandfather" assessment - this used to be a common approach to legacy equipment in response to changing regulations due to the absolute unaffordable of keeping legacy aircraft compliant with modern standards. It was something which HC struggled with, but I have some sympathy because countries like ours simply can't afford to replace aircraft fleets as often as these regulatory changes would require. Not when the expectation (based on recent and current types) is that the in-service life of a military aeroplane could be 30-60 years.
PDR