Originally Posted by
Rigga
Reader8,
The 'say yes and get on' problem is a real killer of airworthiness issues and regulatory progression. Mainly caused, as you imply, by the short-tour officers in a very largely influential post. It is these career-minded idiots that risk many peoples lives by their Trump-like decisions, but borne out of promotion targets and their next tour.
I only met two that were career minded in the sense that you felt inconvenient truths were just being kept close hold, and one definitely wasn't an idiot.
The others weren't career minded idiots, they were good people. They wanted and needed to get on, but falling on your sword, even at EA level, is frankly unlikely to cause more than a small stir as a new EA is found. It's more nuanced. If they don't do it somebody else will. They understood the issues but found themselves in an impossible situation inside an organisation with a deeply flawed culture where staffwork and a good thesaurus were the answer to all problems (The rest of the world does it another way, but why let that concern the path were on). The nub of the problem didn't really lie with the EA anyway, it lay with the customer who knew that they had to fly the things. Many problems were of the customers own making (how many E3's in the green today, what did we tell the Minister last year) and required an ever deeper hole to be dug, some were frankly down to the awful politics of everything at that level, and the fact that the Sun is equally happy to write about things not being pushed far enough (Aircraft grounded in RAF Chaos, there's a war on don't-ya-know) as they are when disaster strikes.
In the end, I just felt that it was 'Yes Minister's writ large, and everybody actually relaxed when the truth was told and they knew where they were.
Unfortunately, that was rarely where the MAA wanted them to be, but that's just another side of the same coin that's significantly unbalanced in weighing resources against tasks against aspirations.
It's quite possible that there was genuinely somebody at the top who was longing to hear the problem and truly accepted that termination was an option. I never had the impression that anybody at 1* level was keen to test the hypothesis, which gives those at the top a perfect get-out (Yes your honour, of course I would have stopped straight away, had I only known). Yeah, right.
For all people can hand-wring about RA's, EA's and DH's the reality from my viewpoint was that they were window dressing to the root cause, which was the naked emperor that is the cause of most good staffwork in non-operational matters.
I didn't envy the DH.