Chugalug2 - and the MAA just keeps generating more pointless hoops to jump through in an effort to prove that paper-safety = real airworthiness (it doesn't) with more bow-ties and safety cases than you can shake a stick at. Keeps career officers in a job but not much else.
Absolutely! The problem for the MAA is that the Regs had already been pulped and the corporate memory forcibly removed before its foundation stone, The Nimrod Review, was well and truly laid. That of course was based on the lie that the very time that the VSO attack on the MOD Airworthiness System occurred was a "Golden Period" of UK Military Airworthiness. If that were so, then the Good Lord protect us from any lesser periods!
So the MAA kicks off with a Year Zero and attempts to rebuild the UK Military Air Safety from its shattered remains. As the man from the Nationwide BS commented, "it doesn't work like that!", and it never will. The only organisation in the UK with an uninterrupted knowledge and expertise in Airworthiness Regulation now is the CAA. Apart from the urgent need to wrest Air Regulation out of the maw of the MOD, the advantage of doing so would be to sister a reformed MAA (with a new civil Director General) alongside the CAA. I have no doubt that neither party would welcome such a marriage, but it would give access to the expertise and knowledge that the MAA is so lacking in. Only then could the long painful rebuilding of airworthiness in the UK Military Airfleets begin.
Ditto all the above with the MilAAIB (or whatever the latest signwriting variant is now hanging outside the front door) to the AAIB. Then, and only then, can Military Air Accident Investigations be able to gain full access to
all the evidence previously withheld from BoIs and SIs by commission or omission. We can then expect some real horror stories emerging into the cold and un-cosy outside world.
I imagine there will be some considerable resistance to my suggestions above, not least because the MAA would have to admit that their foundation stone was made of sand and the cover up would have to be uncovered to reveal the dross that lays beneath.