In my humble opinion, the human factors side of things are taking a turn for the worse
. Yes, technology, operating procedures and experience have all improved rapidly over the last few decades, but at the moment we seem to be asking more and more of engineers, crews and most other people in the flight safty "chain"., and being asked to do so with less and less resources.
With the current engineering set-up at lyneham, as I have mentioned in other threads, we are VASTLY undermanned, and as a result more and more frames are being presented to the crews with long lists of ADF's and LIM's, neither of which can be conducive to flight safty.
The other problem I forsee is now that multi-skilling is taking place, people are going to assume that twice the work can be done, by half the number of people, and manpower will be cut accordingly. A huge number of experienced tradesmen are applying for redundancy, and if they don't get that they are going to PVR, which is going to have a big dent in the engineering skillbase, which again is going to cause long term problems. As all other areas of flight safty have moved on so well, it is about time someone called time on the beancounters, and made sure that the most vunerable area of flight safty , ie human factors, is taken care of properly, and stop expecting miracles from under-equipped, over stretched engineers. Somthing somewhere has to give soon, and it could so easily be prevented........