Beagle………
“Hot air leaks, and the inability to detect whether a bleed air duct is pressurised, are very serious. The old excuse of 'not practicable due to impending OSD' was often trotted out in V-force days - yet the aged jets kept going for years after the TSR2 was supposed to have been in service”.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. The OSD issue used to be formalised in the “Five Year Rule”. That is, if you could not demonstrate 5 years useful life, you could not get the funds. This would be open to interpretation. We (HQ staffs) would, for example, bid for the money in 1980, and simply say the a/c will still be in service in 1985. Sometimes we got away with it, but more often than not the beancounters would say “Bid – 1980, LTC approval – 1981, Contract award – 1983, In Service Date – 1987, Full fleet embodiment – 1989…. Plus 5 = 1994. Sorry, OSD is 1993, forget it”. Inevitably, the OSD would slip, but we needed at least a two year slip to get approval. So, announcements were often one year at a time.
The exception was always safety issues. Until 1991 of course, when as a matter of policy funding was no longer automatically available to investigate/rectify safety problems. As I’ve said elsewhere, we were routinely instructed to ignore safety problems. This is still the case.
This was nothing to do with procurement. All the decisions were taken before procurers got involved.
You never hear this talked about now, mainly because it involves a head and a parapet.