Engines:-
My take (and that's all it is) is that the starting gun for this debacle (and debacle it undoubtedly has been) was the MAA CAMO audit in December 13.
POBJOY:-
Engines When this whole 'episode' kicked off in 2014...
While your time lines are in keeping with the 'episode', ie the OP (the grounding of the ACO Gliders), that is exactly the way that the MOD wants it to be seen. That is how it wanted the Mull Chinook, the Iraq C-130, Tornado, and 2 RN Sea Kings, the Afghanistan Nimrod, and the Red5 ejection tragedies to be seen, ie as separate and unconnected accidents. The default presentation is to stovepipe them, and we oblige by treating each airworthiness related fatal accident to a separate thread. Thank God this one isn't a fatal accident as well, and 2FTS got that bit right at least, if nothing else. We have to take in the wood rather than concentrate solely on each individual tree, for there is no end of those potential fatal accidents waiting to happen if that is our approach.
This episode didn't start in 2013 or 2014, it started when all the others started, and where the next UK Military Airworthiness Related Fatal Air Accident will have started, with an AMSO policy change in 1986. Its gross ineptitude set the MOD looking for a source of short term financial gain to plug the breach in its budgetary dam. It homed in on the only ring fenced finance left, the Air Safety Budget. After it was finished plundering the damage was devastating and permanent. This was Haddon-Cave's so called 'Golden Period'! Thus the very report that the MAA was founded upon was a lie. The MAA is as culpable as the RAF VSOs who carried out the plunder and those who have covered it up since.
What happened here is terrible. A wonderful organisation that inspired new generations of young people into air mindedness has been cut off at the knees. I would remind everyone though that real tragedy has befallen the families and loved ones of those who died in the fatal accidents I have listed, and whose threads exist here as witness to the terrible cost of the illegal actions perpetrated.
Engines, you say:-
I'd be happier if more people were properly and blazingly upset over this. Sadly (so far) they're not.
Well, amen to that. But be very clear. This is much bigger than the ACO scandal, it is much bigger than RAF Engineering, which you seem focussed upon. This is a scandal that has been covered up by the MOD, the MAA, the Civil and RAF Police, the HSE, and HMG. That is the extent of this wood, so standing around and barking at one particular tree alone will serve their purposes well.
Nothing short of a completely separate and independent Military Air Regulator and Military Air Accident Investigator, of the MOD and of each other, can hope to put this genie back in its bottle.
I'd be happier if more people were properly and blazingly upset over that!