Gents,
Responding to Pobjoy's, Chugalug's and Tuc's recent posts: I'm sorry to restate stuff I've previously posted, but trying to pin this on greedy contractors and contractorisation in general is, in my view (and thats all it is) not only missing the point, but also risks not identifying the real issues - and who was actually accountable.
To repeat - in my direct experience, having managed contractorised support for complex operational front line aircraft, the ultimate responsibility for the quality of such support lies firmly with the owning authority (in my case a Naval Air Station's Air Engineering Department). We were accountable for the oversight and management of the work carried out, which is why we took some care to have the work checked out, and to review the qualifications of every person working on our aircraft. We also made the contractors subject to our in house quality checks.
There isn't enough info on what happened with the contractorised support of the RAF's glider fleet (I did place a number of FOI request on this matter, all were refused on commercial confidentiality grounds) but there were clear admissions of failures by the RAF to carry out basic QA checks on the contractors. Here's the thing - these are failures at relatively low rank levels. As Tuc points out, all of this comes under the heading of failing to implement existing instructions and regulations. People were just not doing the stuff that they were to be doing. And what makes this really terrifying is the answer to the simple question: 'Did this only happen to ATC aircraft?'
The truthful answer to that has to be 'Don't know', because, and it hurts me to say it, the RAF is not very good at asking those sorts of questions of itself. Nor is the MoD, and I split these two because there are two important aspects to any airworthiness issue - the first is the procurement system (the 'MoD') doing its job by delivering an airworthy aircraft and sustaining that airworthiness through its life. The demise of Slingsby generated a number of challenges which, it appears clear, the MoD failed to tackle properly.
The second aspect is carrying out the required activity recording, maintenance and modifications required to maintain airworthiness in service. Here's where the RAF dropped the ball, and in my honest view appear to have dropped it big time. I'd offer the observation that when the glider scandal broke, the FTS staff clearly had a very poor grasp of how serious it was and what it would take to fix things - witness the repeated collapse of recovery plan after recovery plan. That lack of grasp indicates to me that it was some time since key people had been doing what they should have been doing. They just didn't appear to know what 'right' looked or sounded like.
My honest and regretful conclusion (speaking as a grateful ex ATC cadet) would be to can the whole exercise and give it over to a civilian organisation who can manage the safety aspects in a sensible and professional way. For the record, I don't agree with using public funds to fly schoolchildren in military aircraft to assist with RAF recruiting. Thats just my opinion, I know others will disagree.
Best Regards as ever to all those fine and honest people out there still picking up the pieces of all this,
Engines