JFZ90, I agree the forces are underfunded, but the last part of your post seems to suggest a partial implementation of the regulations would be acceptable. May I ask what parts you, or anyone here, think can be set aside?
This is not quite what I meant. For me airworthiness "regulations" need to be fully implemented. Full stop.
The problem comes in when you look at some of the things that seem to have gone wrong when relating to Nimrod - care is needed to separate regulations that were missed, or regulations that
were followed but still allowed a safety issue to be missed. The investigation into what went wrong is no doubt looking into this, and speculation is probably not helpful to try and guess exactly where the mistakes were made.
Noting this caveat, as an example, you could pick the safety case process that was conducted several years ago. It is important to remember that conducting a safety case based review of Nimrod was
in line with regulations and best practice. It should, in hindsight, have noticed & actioned the hot pipe ignition risk (this is easy to say of course). The question emerges - so what went wrong? As I say the investigation will probably find the real answers, but imagine for the sake of argument the following outcomes:
a) safety case process was OK, it was 'just' human error. No change to regs / process needed, but perhaps improve training etc.
b) safety case process broadly OK, no major change, but recommend more user involvement to pick up on op usage issues, better training.
c) safety case process failed and hence must be totally revamped
d) safety case process failed, total revamp, can't be left with MoD/contractor and must set up MAA, and new army of "checkers/auditors".
Now this is very simplistic and I'm mixing up issues, but to illustrate my concern, it is possible that a) or b) could be the right answer from an engineering safety perspective, but politically they don't create the desired "we've made a big change to airworthiness so from now on everything is OK". Hence there is a chance that c) and d) may be pursued for these reasons, even if safety won't actually be greatly improved.
It could be argued that a, b, c, and d and all in line with the "regulations" - so I hope you can see that cutting corners is not what I'm getting at - its more about avoiding the risk that we gold plate the solution to achieve political effect.
Lastly - I'm NOT saying that c & d aren't the right answer - it may turn out that bits of these ideas make up part of the right answer - all I'm saying is bigger (more expensive) changes should be justified on their merits and done for the right reasons, not just because 2 MPs are writing letters to each other to score points.