TD, as has been said before you have to put these into context, 20 years of incidents, 2496 IRs = 125 a year = 10 a month and this spread over the whole fleet all over different parts of the country and the world. Additionally IRs are raised for air and ground incidents (allthough most are flying related), so bird strikes, near misses, taxy accidents, maintenance/line personnel accidents, instrument failure, hydraulic failure from component failure, bodging the AAR and damaging the probe etc and the fuel leaks when noticed by the aircrew when flying to name a few that may or may not generate an IR and this is dependent on the personnel involved and severity of the issue in their minds. A lot of these cannot be avoided no matter how many safety measures and procedures you put in place, the only way to avoid most of these is to wrap the aircraft in bubble wrap, not fly them and keep all personnel/birds away from them. Try finding out how many IRs are raised across the Tornado fleet and compare the figures against the amount of Tornados there are in their fleet, you will probably find the comparison will be the same percentage wise and the IRs will be for similar things as well, including fuel leaks.
Last edited by Exrigger; 24th Nov 2007 at 20:04.
Reason: Minor corrections