buoy15
Sir, might I just refer you to something you wrote earlier, where you said the following:
'which would illustrate to this audience the ramifications of a Captain making such a brief - ie - he would no longer be a Captain despite having the balls to protect his crew'
Now thereby lies perhaps the biggest problem that we have here. You are 100% correct with that statement, in that if you ever did 'scrub' a mission, your flying career would be over in days, if not hours.
There is the famous story of the E-3 Captain who scrubbed a Bosnia mission on the grounds that he and his crew were too tired, as they had been unable to sleep during the day due to building work in the hotel. He scrubbed on flight safety grounds and also to highlight the need for the blunties to relocate his crew to a 'quiet' hotel. The result was that he was removed from the fleet within a couple of weeks.
I would also agree entirely with you in your following statement:
'technology exists where a space the size of the Nimrod Bomb Bay could be overwhelmed with an inert gas (Halon) to douse a fire but that would involve weight, size and expense'
I think that is pretty much what I had said earlier about todays military aircraft being made as safe as possible. MR4 will not have a bomb bay fire suppressant for one reason only, and that is COST. Just because they are miltary aircraft, should not be a reason to deny them the latest kit to fight perhaps our greatest enemy in the air - FIRE. MR4 will no doubt have the very latest in electronics, avionics and goodness knows what else. I think that it should also have an up-to-date fire fighting system. Especially in an area where there have been problems in the past. I will refrain from commenting further on the AAR system.
Lastly Sir, Murpheys Law and Sods law do not exist in todays aviation world, not even in the military. We might have got away with them 10, 15 20 years ago, but not today. I doubt if you or I or indeed anyone would accept either of them as a just reason for the death of a loved one.