The HSE will do this, and what does anybody expect? I mean, who thinks that an HSE employee (salary, pension) is going to look at a case and say "no, this is silly, let's focus on something real" and walk away from it? Since when did turkeys vote for xmas?
The moment you create an agency, you have to expect them to do the assigned job.
If you create an agency to check the thickness of chocolate bar wrappers, and enforce this to lie between 20 and 50 microns, they will do exactly that. In the UK (especially in the UK) there is be near unlimited numbers of applicants for a patently stupid and pointless job like that.
The real problem is the idiots who we have in politics, who create these agencies and let them run without proper oversight.
In some ways, I am not suprised aviation is so litigious. Take Lycoming. They make several thousand defective IO360 and IO540 crankshafts. Some of these break, causing a number of deaths and a huge amount of hassle for owners. The worst batches (e.g. those which would probably snap in the first 50 hours) got recalled and Lyco paid for the engine removal, opening, etc. Now, they have recalled all the rest, made 1997-2002, about 5000 of them. This is now an FAA AD and (I guess) will be a CAA AD too, if it isn't already. Mandatory replacement within 12 years of manufacture. Lyco, in their infinite corporate kindness
, are offering to sell you a new crank for a mere USD 2000 (a discount of about USD 10000) but you have to pay for the engine work, about £ 7000 if done in the UK. Also, this very kind discount crank offer is valid for only about 2 more years (making a blatent joke of the 12 year AD time limit). People like this should be sued in a class action and made to pay. Unfortunately, they have been very clever, and they offer to replace the crank FOC if you use
them for your next engine overhaul (which has to be done within 12 years anyway, as a lot of "on condition" operators on G-reg know rather well
) and this gives them pretty good protection from a class action. The fact that not many owners use Lyco for zero-time overhauls (because Lyco's QA is the pits and everybody knows it, and the "zero-time" engine you get back can be made up of a bucket of secondhand parts of an unlimited age) is irrelevant to the legal position. In this business, so many vendors are such crooks, and everybody knows it, that they don't really care anymore what anybody thinks - because anybody determined will just sue and they do a settlement, and the plaintiff signs an NDA so nobody finds out what deal was done.