"..Ageing fleet of aircraft....blah blah..."
How often I hear this phrase, and how it conveniently sidesteps the REAL issue.
The AGE of the aircraft is ALMOST irrelevant - after all, about the only parts of the K's that are ACTUALLY 40 years old are the fuselages. The real issue here is that we cannot fix or service them, because they have LEANed away all our manpower, and we don't have the bits to fix them, because they have 'Just-In-Time'-ed all the spares (now THAT'S a spin-phrase if ever I heard one!
If we somehow managed to aquire, from somewhere, a brand new fleet of K's built to exactly the same specifications as the ones we have, they would require no less (or very little less) maintenance than the '40 year old' ones do. I suspect the same is true of the VC10 and Tristar fleets.
If we could get back the eng manpower, and the spares stocks, we would see availability rocket.
Yes, I KNOW that doesn't address the fatigue issue, but that can be cured (or at least postponed) by bolting on new wings, which puts it straiight into the 'spares' and 'manpower' pidgeonhole in my book.
Another bad decision by a particularly daft bint chasing an OBE...