In answer to the last bit, Duty of Care.
The Secretary of State is responsible for Airworthiness, and delegates Authority (but not responsibility) via letters of delegation. The “legal” aspect was re-enforced by the repeal of Section 10 of the Crown Proceedings Act, which had hitherto effectively prevented the possibility of a court case against Crown Servants.
One therefore has an obligation to adhere to the Secretary of State’s regulations, for example JSP553. The whole point of many of my posts is that many of the aircraft hierarchy in MoD(PE) (and DPA, DLO, AMSO, AML), including the Chinook and equipment support 2 Stars, disagreed with this obligation, creating an impasse whereby one risked all by insisting on implementing the airworthiness regs.
On the documentation issue, for the exact Validation and Verification chain you’d have to look at the Publications Management Plan signed by the Publications Authority and Project Director. Any other source is an opinion, albeit informed. These differ little between projects – it is usually a case of filling in the project-specific blanks in a template, which promotes commonality and consistency.
But, at the time, it was common practice for Aircraft Technical Pubs (Farnborough and then Glasgow) to manage Technical Pubs by contracting (or, more likely, asking the Technical Agency to contract) the respective Design Authorities to prepare them, and ATP would validate them.
However, for the ODM, ACM and FRCs it was common for RAFHS to do the entire job themselves. (I believe this was the case for the Mk2). Many disagreed with this, not least some RAFHS staffs as they very often didn’t have the resources, so these pubs were often not up to date, incomplete, didn’t reflect the RTS etc. Again, the record shows this was the case on Mk2.
I’ll take your word STANEVAL verified them – the PMP would confirm this.
Today it is different, with RAFHS usually confining themselves to validation. i.e. the process is the same for all pubs.
On the other hand, ATP as we knew it doesn’t exist. The system has “dumbed down” to the extent that many aircraft pubs are little more than vendor handbooks.
I imagine the legacy Mk1 Tech Pubs formed the basis of the Mk2 suite (notwithstanding Ingram’s claims). As the RAF had stopped funding their routine upkeep (certainly for equipment) in 1991, the chances of the Mk1 suite being up to date were minuscule. (It follows that the normal contractual vehicle I mentioned, the Technical Agencies’ contracts, often simply didn’t exist; or were paper contracts only, lacking funding). Therefore, the PMP mentioned above should have a significant section dealing with resurrection and stabilisation of this part of the build standard. But implementation of the Plan? If they rushed through Release to Service, when 7 months later A&AEE were still struggling with Software validation, do you think they paid much attention to pubs?
Thanks for your reply.