Amazing the myths that perpetuate around this aircraft.
This aircraft was first designed for the civilian and military market. However the Aussie military wanted nothing to do with them. That was ok initially, however civilian sales were almost nonexistent. So along with the best traditions of politicians they forced them on the military that, as was said by tipsy2, were against being landed with them as it filled a gap in capability that simply did not exist!
The airframe that had the tail fall off was used extensively for testing in particular high power ground runs. A lot of these ground runs were asymmetric high powered runs. Now this may have been fine except for the fact that firstly they were never logged and secondly the actual affects of the stress from the ground runs on the airframe never really inspected. The ADF blamed GAF for the undocumented runs and likewise GAF blamed the ADF for the way the aircraft was operated...
As late as Jan/Feb 1997 (just as Boeing bought ASTA - and ASTA were making rudders and centre section fuselages for Airbus - but that is another story) I witnessed a destructive static load test on a modified Nomad tail section that went to 2.54 (IIRC) times the previous aircraft ultimate load before it failed. Was quite impressive, however this has nothing to do with the Nomad story, just thought I would chuck it in.
Anyway the Nomad story is one that was so politicised and had so much forced on it and expected of it, that it was simply doomed to failure. A lot of SE Asian militaries were very much interested in the aircraft, however our government of the time, that could see no future in an indigenous aircraft manufacturing capability basically shot that down before it even got off the ground. The final nail in the coffin was the failure of the tailplane and the loss of a Defence Force pilot. The aircraft was already doomed before this and it is a shame that this had to happen. Alas, along with a whole bunch of other Aussie designed aircraft there simply never was the political will and support for an Australian designed aircraft. Thus we now have an aircraft parts industry of which we do lead the world in a number of areas, but who knows what could have been.
However Australia did have a number of Nomads just "sitting" there at the end of all this and these were essentially gifted to SE Asian countries who from all accounts have simply loved the aircraft and have had no further dramas with it.
Mind you there is the flip side of the argument that Australia simply could never and would never be able to afford to develop aircraft that were competitive with the large manufacturers of today and in fact the government had a lot of foresight to essentially get out of the aircraft design business when it did before it sucked an inordinate amount of money from the Australian economy.
Anyway there is heaps to this story and it makes for very interesting and frustrating reading and leads to dreams of what possibly could have been a fully fledged aircraft design and manufacturing industry in Australia - for however long it lasted. The reason I say this is I am sure that even if we did have a proper aircraft manufacturing industry that had been supported, it would definitely have been privatised by the government and would have been subsumed as ASTA was under one of the big two aircraft manufacturers left in the world anyway, my humble opinion only.
Cheers
Mr B