Engines, thanks for responding. With respect (and that is not just an empty phrase!), I feel it is always essential in regard to airworthiness to emphasise the wood for the trees. The MOD's default treatment of airworthiness related fatal air accidents is to stovepipe them and to obscure the common thread that connects them all, the totally dysfunctional UK Military Air Safety system that exists under its Regulator, the MAA, aka the MOD.
Of course, it takes incompetence of heroic levels to render such simple airframes as the ATC Gliders unairworthy, rendered as they were thus by the Royal Air Force. That incompetence though stems directly from the disintegration of a competent regulatory body, caused by the deliberate subversion and suborning of the Regulations and those whose mandated duty it was to implement them in full.
By saying this was an RAF owned problem we are doing the MOD's work for them, concentrating on those at the bottom of the food chain when the fundamental cause was the subversion wrought in the late 80s
and the cover up ever since. So there were and are VSOs (mainly RAF) at the root of this dysfunction and I must challenge your assertion that:-
Very few VSOs were involved, whatever the colour of their stripes.
The ongoing Cover-Up is the very reason for the incompetence that you rightly highlight for the appalling state of the RAF ATC gliders. It has prevented meaningful reform of UK Military Air Regulation and Accident Investigation. Instead of the real independence necessary to prevent repeated interference by vested interests in both functions we have the Ersatz fake MOD interdependent MAA and MilAAIB (or whatever it's called this week). Thus those VSOs responsible for the initial subversion are protected, and thus airworthiness related air accidents (often fatal) continue.
Thank God that wasn't (
AFAIK) the case with the ATC Gliders, but to consider them alone rather than as part of a UK Military Air Safety scandal connecting all three Services is to congratulate the Starboard Watch for their far superior arranging of deck-chairs while the Good Ship hurtles ever on at top speed. This isn't about inter Service anything. This is about life and death. If we don't get that, then aviation has a habit of reminding us all in very short order.