Originally Posted by
KenV
Why would the Spanish military be involved in this accident at all? The Spanish military has no design or engineering authority for this aircraft. It was never signed over to them so they don't have operating authority for this aircraft. No Spanish military personnel were at the controls, so there was not even peripheral Spanish military involvement in the flight. So why no Annex 13 investigation report?
The aircraft wasn't being developed by Airbus as a standalone PV project, rather it was developed in response to a contract agreed with OCCAR (with Spain as one of the end customers), and the contract would detail the qual and cert procedures to be followed. NB the procedures used to be available on OCCAR'S website but I can't find them. The procedures could have agreed to use Airbus' standard EASA civil approval to fly development aircraft or they could've opted to flight certification under Sp military processes (which could also rely on the civil Type Certification of the Design issued by EASA although this may not have been available for early development flying). Whichever organisation was regulating the development flying would determine which accident investigation procedures to be adopted, hence my point about the registration number, military or civil.
Complex multinational military aircraft procurement programmes tend to breed complex qual and cert procedures. A friend was a senior airworthiness person in Airbus and in the early days of A400M he said that Airbus would cover the whole project under civil processes, none of these silly military processes. I patted him on the shoulder and suggested he tell me that in 10 years time and we'd see whose vision of the future was correct.
EAP