From the excellent
Omaha World-Herald series of articles cited above:
Hopkins said there's a cautionary tale in the story of the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod, which used to fly reconnaissance missions for Great Britain's Royal Air Force.
Like the RC-135s, the Nimrods were built in the 1960s from a 1950s jet airframe.
Like the C-135s, they were plagued by aging aircraft problems.Then, in 2006, a Nimrod caught fire just after aerial refueling near Kandahar in southeastern Afghanistan. The plane exploded in flames and crashed, killing all 14 British airmen aboard.
Two government inquiries blamed the crash on a fuel leak that ignited because of a design flaw that had been known to the RAF but was ignored because it had never caused an accident. After a second nonfatal incident, the British Ministry of Defense permanently grounded the Royal Air Force’s entire fleet of 46 Nimrods.
To replace them, the Defense Ministry decided to spend $1 billion to buy three RC-135s, which they named "Airseekers." All three would be converted from KC-135 aerial refueling tankers that are more than 50 years old. Some in the RAF objected. “(They) were hostile to acquiring these three airplanes because they were equally aged and subject to similar vulnerabilities," Hopkins said. A Parliamentary inquiry into the Nimrod disaster ripped the RAF and a private safety consulting firm for fostering a culture of complacency that placed cost-cutting ahead of safety, as well as a failure to account for the problems associated with aging aircraft.
The inquiry described what it called a "normalization of deviance," in which military leaders learned over years to accept problems like the Nimrod's persistent fuel leaks. They compared it to NASA's complacency prior to the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters.
A few 55th Wing veterans say they worry about what they fear is a similar culture of complacency in their old command.
"This whole thing stinks to me, to high heaven," said retired Brig. Gen. Reg Urschler of Bellevue, who commanded the unit and is a member of the Wing's Hall of Fame. "People have become accustomed to this. They believe it's normal, and they press on."
"It's unequivocally not normal," Hopkins said. "If you think this is acceptable, you're part of the problem."
https://www.omaha.com/news/military/...ae869b8e3.html