TSM:
Can I just ask you one simple question please?.......
Why oh why, in the light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, do you still keep defending this government, RAF, MOD whoever about this accident?
The facts are pretty conclusive as far as I'm concerned.
Presumably you have read the CinC's remarks in the BOI Report. He was careful not to attribute blame to any organisation that contributed to the Safety Case, which he lambasted as follows:
"
Most critically, this accident indicates that the NSC was
wrong in its assessment.....that the hazard was ...improbable. This
flawed NSC was further compounded by...."
"most critically" means that the NSC is pivotal to what happened. He wrote that, knowing who the contibutors to the NSC are. The documents are in evidence. Earlier in the BOI report we are informed that the NSC, as a living document, lies in the joint "ownership" of the RAF and BAe, with an independant check carried out by a third organistion. All 3 organisations were very active in the process. Therefore, the SoS owes it to the RAF, BAe and the 3rd party, to ask a QC to unravel the workings of the NSC and apportion blame where it lies. You have to ask yourself, if you have any interest, why would the SoS for Defence ask a QC to do this, if all the blame rests within his own department. You might not like him, but he ain't stupid. He has been well briefed.
I'm not defending the RAF against reasoned and accurate criticism. In some aspects, we have made some huge blunders: not checking the accuracy of a safety case, using a corrective maintenance policy without an appropriate trend analysis system to enable a quality review of the policy, not acting quickly to a Stn Cdr's recommendation to check hot air pipes (see above) and, finally, leaders slavishly adhering to BOI protocol, such that crucial information, that would later assist a crew faced with a fuel leak, was not released earlier.
Regards
Ed Sett