Thanks Engines, you paint a sombre and unedifying picture of a dysfunctional system that couldn't organise the proverbial piss-up if it wanted to. What I would plead for is that every one who reads your posts realises that the scandal that is ACO gliders is but one tree in a Service wide forest of dysfunction. The same incompetence and negligence exposed here extends throughout UK Military Aviation. The results have been explored in the far too many fatal accident threads that besmirch this Forum. Sadly there will be more. What is the point of experienced and highly qualified members like yourself and tuc dissecting the likes of Mull, Nimrod, Hercules, Sea King, Tornado, and Red Arrows fatal accidents to reveal the common denominator as here, ie loss/lack of airworthiness, if no meaningful reform is enacted?
Even if the MAA could have presided over a return to airworthiness of the Vigilants as the CAA has done (and I personally doubt that it could), it would not wish to do so. Any undue attention drawn to military unairworthiness invites questions as to why it is so prevalent. That in turn draws renewed focus back onto Haddon-Cave's so called Golden Period of UK Military Airworthiness, which of course was anything but. The reason these simple aircraft, and far more complex ones, became unairworthy harks beck to that era of deliberate and malevolent attacks by RAF VSOs on UK Military Air Safety. They merely wanted access to the ring fenced monies that funded the continuous process that is airworthiness, but in accessing the former (to cover VSO incompetence) they destroyed the latter. Rebuilding the structure to start down the necessary path of reform requires a fundamental change for the MAA and the MAAIB (or whatever the latest sign writer's efforts might now read). They both need to be made independent of the MOD and of each other. Until then the lie that Haddon-Cave bequeathed us, and the MAA views as sacred text, still stands. Unairworthiness will go on infecting the military air fleets and avoidable deaths will simply continue.
Self Regulation Doesn't Work and in Aviation It Kills!