Reply to Chug Post
Chug,
I’d like to reply to your last post, which, as I read it, posed three questions:
1. What would have been expected of me if I’d been given an order to ‘suborn’ airworthiness?
2. Why didn’t senior RN engineers confront their RAF equivalents about the issues with the Chinook Mk2, and:
3. How did the actions of senior RAF officers lead to the FAA’s own airworthiness issues?
Firstly, I apologise to everyone here if I ever give the impression of being an important or good air engineer. I wasn’t. I was no more than average and sometimes not even that. I was lucky to receive a very good training and to have had excellent bosses who guided and led me to do a reasonable job.
To your first question – I trusted my superiors to be honest and right, and they trusted me to do the right thing. If I was given a reasonable order, it was my duty to carry it out. If I didn’t think it was reasonable, I was expected to say so. An example might help.
Early in my career as a Lieutenant, I was what the RAF would call the ‘JEngO’ on my first front line squadron. One of our Sea Kings landed onboard for a crew change with a whistling noise coming from the rotor – I had the aircraft shut down and saw that a section of the rotor blade’s rubber leading edge strip had worn away and was coming off. I told the crew to shut down so we could get it in the hangar and replace a section of the strip. My Senior Pilot, (with a lot more experience on the aircraft than me and senior in rank) was due to take the aircraft on its next sortie. He strongly told me that the aircraft was ‘wholly serviceable’ and that I would get the aircraft to fix when he’d finished his sortie. I replied that it wasn’t his decision, it was mine, and the aircraft was going to be shut down. The Senior Pilot got quite loud and shouty, so I suggested that we should take the discussion elsewhere - we found a quiet compartment while the aircraft was shut down and stowed.
The SP shouted a bit more, and fingers were pointed at the general area of my chest. Direct orders were given and I was asked if I understood that I'd been given those orders. However, I had no option but to tell him that the decision on serviceability wasn’t his, it was mine, and if he didn’t like it he could get on the radio and talk to my boss, the AEO (RN parlance there). After a pause, the SP snorted ‘very well then!’ and stalked off. But later that day he came to see me, acknowledged that it was my call not his, and that I’d made the right call. He reminded me that I would have far harder decisions to take in the future and that talking to the aircrew before I made them would always be advisable. Our subsequent working relationship (which included some significant operational stuff) was based on strong mutual respect and was excellent.
To your second - my guess would be that the ‘stove piping’ of the various services’ engineering systems gave very few avenues for any RN engineer to question or challenge the actions of ACAS and his staff. One senior RN AEO serving at Boscombe is mentioned in the book, and I am reasonably sure he would have had a view on the Mk2’s RTS – but it was being signed off by an ‘operator’, ACAS. I am certain that no RAF aircrew VSO would have taken the slightest notice of an RN engineer of Captain (or indeed any higher) rank. Nor would anyone in MoD, given the RAF’s grip on the higher political levels. Remember as well that at this time there was no overarching airworthiness authority that spanned the MoD and the three services – frankly, what went on in the RAF stayed in the RAF and this was generally the case for the other two services.
This reflected what I subsequently saw (yeah, hindsight, I know) as a systemic failure within the Uk’s military airworthiness management systems to look out for best and worst practice, and to then apply the lessons. There were simply no effective systems I ever encountered to get the Services (and MoD) together and ‘compare and contrast’ systems and methods to mutual benefit. In one of my last jobs working in the MoD, I tried to set up a ‘cross platform group’ to address serious issues that were affecting several platforms installing the same piece of kit. My team had developed some great ideas that could have been used by others to good effect and we’d have loved to get ideas from others. No interest at all.
To your third question – I think that Tuc could better answer that one, but I’ll give it a go. The RAF was (quite understandably) seen as the lead service on all things to do with aircraft. They had (and probably still have) strong political support at high levels, and that made ‘taking on the RAF’ a loser’s game. The RN got on with what it had been given as best it could, but there was little it could do once the RAF had effectively taken control of the MoD’s logistics support systems, I guess in the 1980s. Many of the airworthiness related decisions were taken by MoD civilian personnel, and by the 90s, the rot had set in across many departments. Could RN engineers have made poor decisions? Absolutely – humans can do that. Generally, the RN had good control mechanisms to catch them – but not always.
Sorry, this has been a long reply – but I thought Chug’s post deserved a proper response.
Best Regards as ever to all those young engineers out there today doing the right thing when it’s required. Keep on doing it.
Engines