“the probability of a passenger being killed on a single flight at approximately eight million-to-one”.
To even begin attempting a like for like comparison, ask any commercial aircraft manufacturer what these figures would be if he were to factor in something simple; like routinely flying over a war zone and carrying out AAR with a system which (it would appear) does not meet today’s standards. The risk may become less than acceptable, so he may mitigate it with, say, a DAS. However, the act of fitting and integrating (two different things, something the MoD and I differ on) a DAS produces positives and negatives. It provides a degree of protection, but there is a weight and power penalty (which, to him, merely means loss of income; but to us means more a/c required to sustain operational effectiveness). And so on, and on….. Sorry, the process of designing a civilian airliner and a military aircraft coincide at a theory of flight and basic engineering level (sometimes not even then) and diverge almost immediately. I don’t think this a line of argument worth pursuing.
I believe the important thing here, and in other incidents (Mull, C130, Tornado, AEW and more), is that the MoD’s approach to maintaining safety (and in some cases delivering safety in the first place) has been criminally negligent for, at least, 16 years. This figure is based on my own personal experiences of being told to ignore safety issues (instructions I completely ignored); others may think it longer. 16 years is not a great length of time in acquisition terms (so the effects take a while to become apparent); but it is many generations of MoD staffs, both Service and civilian, who have been brought up on a system which regards maintaining safety as a waste of money. Otherwise, why would they (the RAF in particular – sorry but it’s a simple, verifiable fact, as you controlled air support funding in 1991) slash the budgets and cancel contracts whose sole purpose were to maintain the build standard (including safety). Those who know the “system” well will understand that, regrettably, when you offer up money as a savings measure (as the RAF did in 1991) it is nigh on impossible to get it back. As the years pass, the argument becomes “We haven’t had too many losses, so why do you want to regress to routinely maintaining safety?” Give me a gun please.