Thanks Edsett, a most illuminating report. Numerous airworthiness issues, lack of engineering training and experience, lack of publicised technical procedures, failure to brief front line crews on essential BoI information. I am surprised by the criticism made of the Captain. This aircraft was landed 8 minutes after the fuel leak was detected and the aircraft was handed to engineers for investigation. SOPs are there for guidance. There is an infamous case of an airliner that allegedly crashed because of a failure to
shorten the normal check-list.
Swissair 111 Aftermath Difficult to judge in this case because the info on the emergency procedure has been removed.
However, there would appear to be a disconnect between the public pronouncements of the safety of Nimrod by CAS and the actual feeling on the front line at the time. A leadership issue? I haven't seen the word emotion used so widely in a report of this nature before. You could easily replace that word with experience, but it handily places responsibility for a supposedly unnecessary diversion squarely with the crew. And what if the Captain hadn't ordered one of his crew to monitor the bomb bay? A procedure that was not official at the time.......
One question screaming out to me, why not carry out an AAR air test in these circumstances? Testing equipment capable of delivering less than 50% of actual AAR flow rate would appear to be woefully inadequate. Interested in your comments?
Thumbs up to the crew who were in the dark as to circumstances that had killed their colleagues a year earlier.