ShyTorque wrote:
Whatever happened on the flight (and no-one knows, we can only theorise), there was certainly negligence at a higher level. There WERE another options (civvy air or even postpone / cancel the flight), and it could be argued that the RAF failed in its duty of care to the passengers and the crew.
Someone in higher authority made a very poor decision by insisting that an aircraft without a C of A clearance (and actually grounded the previous day by the very department responsible for introducing it into service) should be used for the flight, or any other.
The pilots, having been forced into a corner and paid the ultimate sacrifice, have shamefully been scapegoated by their superiors.
That is exactly as I see it. Thank you ShyTorque for such a pithy summary, and thank you Courtney for being the cause of it! Simply substitute the name of any major airline for RAF and you see the enormity of management failure here. But such a civilian scenario could not have occurred. Why? Because the independent Airworthiness Authority, the CAA, would not have allowed a Public Transport operation of such a flawed aircraft to have been flown. Here as in the case of the Hercules fleet, in the case of the Nimrod fleet, in the case of numerous other military aircraft fleets, we see the urgent need to remove Airworthiness Authority from the MOD and into an independent MAA without delay. All of these failures need to be seen in toto, not as separate accidents but as a chain of command failure, by the very commanders who presided over the travesty that this thread seeks to overturn.