Originally Posted by
Jackonicko
As 'predicted' on 3rd March...
BV, as usual, talks a lot of sense, but my problem with Knighton is not that he isn't aircrew, isn't an air power practitioner, nor that he has never had an operational command, but more that he seems unimpressive in his appearances before the HCDC, and smacks of having become the continuity candidate once Turner did his bike rack impersonation.
Whereas both Mayhew and Stringer have always impressed and always seemed immensely high calibre.
I hope I'm wrong.
Well, I hope so too. As others have pointed out, his "Air Power Practitioner" predecessors have presided over the now compromised state of the present day Royal Air Force. A particular compromise to my mind, you will not be surprised to hear, is the lack of airworthiness infecting its air fleets. Not only was this visited upon the RAF by VSO APP's in the late 80s/early 90's (in order to raid the Air Safety ring fenced budgets), but their illegal orders and activities have been covered up ever since by their successors. The result is that vital Air Regularity and Air Accident Investigatory reforms have been prevented (other than by occasional visits of the sign-writer) ever since. It was the expelling of experienced airworthiness engineers, both service and civilian, from their posts when they failed to obey those illegal orders that rid UK Military Aviation of the necessary corporate knowledge to reverse the malignant effect of the APPs' sabotage of UK Air Power.
That the RAF will now be led by an Engineer must surely give us some hope that he at least understands airworthiness and can start the long and painful process of regaining it. The rot started at the top and the star chamber has to set its own house in order and stop using subordinates as sacrificial lambs to cover its own incompetence. It seems there has been a slight shift in policy there, whereby companies are wrongly blamed instead, if the prosecution by HSE of MBL is anything to go by. The RAF sabotaged an MBL ejection seat by issuing an illegal servicing instruction that lead to the death of a pilot. This is a scandal that cries out for reform and not drawing the wagons into ever tighter circles!
Or do the airworthiness related fatal accident threads simply get added to further?