Robert Fox in the Grauniad:
Nimrod disaster no enigma
......Running behind the report on the Nimrod crash is the story of an ancient aircraft of about 30 years of continuous service, which has been bodged and converted many times over and is now doing a job for which it was never designed.
Primarily designed to carry out anti-submarine patrols over the North Sea, this model of the Nimrod, the MR2, was due out of service years ago. The fuselage is basically that of the old De Havilland Comet, the world's first jet airliner that took to the skies over half a century ago. The Nimrod fleet is supposed to undergo special Nimrod Safety Case reviews on an almost annual basis, plus a special Nimrod Ageing Aircraft Review. Neither identified the danger of the hot air pipe contacting high pressure fuel leaks in the 'dry bay' area in front of No 7 fuel tank.
Nimrod MR2 is due to be replaced by the new MR4A version which won't be fully up and running until 2012. The accident report published today by the RAF Board of Inquiry says all MR2s should be out of service in 2010, but the RAF has said some will have to go on for two more years at least.
The story of the Kandahar crash raises some big questions for the services and the MoD, which the government seems reluctant to address - as ever. It is a story of an ageing piece of equipment stretched to its limit, and reading between the lines of the report stretching the patience of its air and ground crews. The report states coyly in a number of passages that there has been an abnormal level of resignations and retirements from the Nimrod air and ground crews in the year since XV230 broke up in mid-air, west of Kandahar.
All three services have to put up with a catalogue of aged, in some cases exhausted, equipment. They have to work on budgets barely adequate for the forces of a Britain entirely at peace - instead, they are engaged in two war-like operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and counter-terrorist and surveillance operations in nearly a dozen countries.
One of the best, or worst examples, was the aircraft that refuelled the ill-fated Nimrod XV230, a converted Lockheed Tristar. The RAF bought the Tristars secondhand at the time of the Falklands conflict 25 years ago - and they are due to run on to 2015 at least. They were supposed to be replaced by a freighter/tanker version of the A330 Airbus to be acquired on a complicated Public Finance Initiative for financing known as the Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft programme, costed at around £13bn over just under 30 years - the biggest private finance initiative undertaken by the MoD.
Funny old thing, we haven't anything officially about this programme for a year or more now. Perhaps it won't happen, after all......................