Walter, you addressed me in Post #4216. Apologies for the late response, it has been a busy Easter at Chateau Chug!. Your comment re airworthiness to my quote that:
This is a story of the intentional dismemberment of the airworthiness protection of the UK Military Airfleet.
Was:
Perhaps this is a pragmatic approach when a complex aircraft is purchased from overseas
To tucumseh above, you say:
The only merit in the continuance of the airworthiness debate in this instance is if you think a better performing Chinook could have helped them in a desperate evasive manoeuvre
all of which makes me wonder if airworthiness means different things to you than it does to me. Admittedly it can cover a multitude of sins (literally in the case of the MOD) but at its worst, unairworthiness can mean the spontaneous explosion of an aircraft having just conducted a routine as authorised in the RTS (eg Nimrod). Wikipedia (hardly an authority but convenient for our purpose) quotes JSP553, Military Airworthiness Regulations (2006) Edition 1 Change 5 in defining Airworthiness as:
The ability of an aircraft or other airborne equipment or system to operate without significant hazard to aircrew, ground crew, passengers (where relevant) or to the general public over which such airborne systems are flown
This definition applies equally to civil and military aircraft.
Airworthiness provision by the Airworthiness Authority is not a matter of pragmatism but a legal requirement. It is certainly not merely a matter of comparative performance or responsiveness between similar aircraft as you seem to suggest. As regards aircraft “purchased from overseas”, it might well be pragmatic to piggy back on the airworthiness authority of the manufacturing nation (eg the USA) when buying “off the shelf” and no doubt smaller Air Forces and their Airworthiness Authorities do just that. The problem with the Brits is that we love to tinker. We certainly did so with the RAF’s C-130K’s as well as here with the Chinook Mk2. “Change this, fit that, substitute the other” ensures numerous airworthiness implications. Overlay that with a culture of only paying lip service to airworthiness, ie signing it off without enforcing it, and you have a disaster in the making. That is the lack of Duty of Care of which tucumseh speaks. We don’t know why ZD576 crashed. We do know that as a type its airworthiness was heavily compromised, and as an individual airframe it had an alarming history of malfunction in its short life. Gross Negligence cannot be proved against the pilots. It can and should be proved against the MOD, irrespective of the cause of this tragedy.