Squidlord,
a thought provoking and interesting entry to the discussion. I would like to emphasise however that the points from my own post that you have quoted were very much questions, rather than statements - struggling to understand it all myself, I have no engineering expertise unless feeding very strong coffee and curry to the FLt Eng counts - so my 5 points were an invitation to others to comment, as in 'have I got this right?' JFZ90 promptly added a bit, and right or wrong he (?) made me see there was (possibly) a time dimension I hadn't really considered before - my basic problem being I keep expecting there to be a set of rules by which a system is declared ok or not. Instead it seems to be a mental Gordian knot.
For what it's worth, and to avoid anyone mentally placing me in one camp or the other incorrectly, my thoughts run thus:
20-30 years ago we used to comment on Nimrods being exceptionally safe - every time you went through the OCU or NCF etc people would queue up to tell you 'we should have lost 2 by now' or similar. Had AAR never been fitted I suspect the Nimrod would have exited service renowned for its safety record...achieved, at times, by a mere whisker, admittedly. I imagine everyone who has ever flown on them has a fair stock of 'almost' stories.
My feeling is that sometime post '82 an approach of 'it's been okay so far' was substituted for rigorous safety procedures, and that has been exacerbated by declining experience levels in just about every trade, including aircrew. No aspersions here at all on competence, but experience and numbers do tend to count. Take away the money as well and it's a recipe for disaster. We ALL saw that coming though, frankly. EVEYONE (well, almost) tells you how much better it all used to be.....they did that in 1925 too.
AAR was a Heath-Robinson lash up in 82. In my OPINION it clearly wasn't rigorously tested at any point after the dust settled...otherwise, my brain says, we'd have had a good idea of how big a pressure spike the system could safely handle, for one thing. In 1982 it was forgivable, we needed it NOW - personally I don't think that an AAR system failure almost 25 years later says much good of the safety management of Nimrod, surely in all that time it could have been given a thorough going over to check it was really okay?
ALARP - I believe I get the basic idea, I also believe (perhaps wrongly) it is possible to fly the aircraft safely without it being ALARP, provided AAR isn't performed (for example) and perhaps other procedural changes are enforced. I can readily accept that some of those changes might not become public knowledge for a variety of reasons.
Overall, the RAF and MOD let some old crewmates and their families down, as usual it was the servicemen, and their families, who paid for that. I think it is up to the RAF and MOD to make it very obvious they are doing all that they can to turn this around - my OPINION post inquest is that they are still more determined to hide problems than address them.
Dave