A call to Arms
Mike Jenvey, thank you for responding to my 'call to arms'. Yes, you are quite right to attribute tucumseh with a special knowledge of what goes wrong in the implementation of Airworthiness provision, and even more importantly a willingness to reveal what he knows on this forum, subject to the OSA and what is already in the public domain but not spelled out. What makes him do it? I suspect he is driven by his training, engineers must surely be able to empathise with his fury at seeing all the processes designed to make aircraft safe being subverted by ignorance (ie those not so trained) and worse still malevolence (those in authority who ride roughshod over any like him who try to enforce airworthiness protection into military aircraft and their systems). How has it come to such a dreadful pass? As ever the reason is simple, good men (and women) were unwilling to stand up and stop it. Why was it done? Who knows, ostensibly to save money one supposes, in a ministry renowned for its wastefulness the one process where slashing expenditure has an immediate sting in the tail was not a wise move. These are not wise people, they are ignorant single minded bullies and should have no power over such vital work which must be removed into the safe qualified hands of a dedicated independent authority established for the purpose.
What Mr Haddon-Cave, or for that matter tucumseh himself, does is entirely up to them. What is important here and now is what each of us on this thread does. If you are convinced, as I am, that further preoccupation with the minutiae of the MOD structure for airworthiness enforcement is pointless, because that structure is now completely dysfunctional, then what is to be done? I feel that we are in the position of having tried to diagnose the random and seemingly pattern less malfunctioning of an undercarriage actuating ram. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it starts but then stops. Others it seems have been preoccupied with flying control faults, similarly random, yet others with a variety of other bizarre symptoms. One person then questions if the right hydraulic fluid was ever used, or a cheaper but incorrect one. Do you go on concentrating on the undercarriage fault, or take seriously this latest contribution and check it out? Now I know my analogy can be shot down with ease, but I hope that what I am trying to say is understood. We, that is aviation professionals (well ex in my case) of whatever persuasion, tend to go deeply into things to discover what is wrong. In this case what is wrong is the thing itself, ie the system or rather the way in which it has become subverted. As I have said before forget the trees, look at the woods.
So to get back to my query, what is to be done? PPRuNe is powerful, especially when it talks about what is dearest to its heart. If Flight Safety isn’t just that, I do not know what is. So we should pick up on the theme that tucumseh espouses, contributing anything in our knowledge that supports his stance, calling individually for the total reform of this blighted system, supporting the call for an independent MAA, in short speak out! Is this the right thread on which to do that? I would say yes. This tragedy seems to have finally caused pennies to drop in the minds of those who should have been alert all along to this farrago, if any good is to come out of it then this is surely it. We owe much to those who perished in XV230, the very least we can do is to strive with all our might to ensure that preventable accidents like this, and far to many others within the military air fleets, are avoided in future by reinvigorating the process of military airworthiness provision, ie by creating an MAA.
Last edited by Chugalug2; 18th Dec 2007 at 15:24.