Hillier was poorly briefed and aware and he came over badly. I'm sure he's intelligent enough to spot where he went wrong today and where the RAF went wrong with the Herc and Nimrod in the past - whether he has the courage to argue for a better system will remain to be seen.
Senior staff have always argued that Albert was procured in the 1960s to be operated only in benign environments and so didn't need ESF.
Well, that may be the case but someone at MoD PE/DE&S/IPT should have spotted the huge flaws in this assumption when we started operating Albert in hostile/threat areas - and they knew the answer to the problem (ESF) - its been known about for years in PE and scientific circles.
However, it is arguable when the change to a hostile operating environment happened exactly for Albert. How about the middle-east in the late 1960s? Northern Ireland in the 1970s? Rhodesia in the 1980s (in fact, anywhere in Africa)? Sth Atlantic, GW1, Balkans etc etc - it doesn't matter; these were all way before AFG/IRQ and the vulnerability should have been addressed!
As I have said, we (the sqns) were lulled into a false sense of security for which we must take some responsibilty but some people did see the the problem (going back to the 70s) However, the message never made it to MoD central funding! However, it is PE/DE&S/IPTs who are the ones who have always been charged with this overall airworthiness responsibility and it is they who should have spelt it out more forecfully to the madarins in charge of the purse-strings. Sadly, the airworthiness system is a mere shadow of its former self. 15 -20 years of cuts, reorganisations and continued loss of experience/knowledge (in itself, against the regs) have emasculated the military airworthiness process and I doubt it can ever recover - so perhaps now it is time to take that responsibility away from an already overstretched military system?
What is worse is that this insidious reduction of engineering and design insight has been staring us in the face - a number of accidents have highlighted this but such is the lack of freedom of military accident investigations/BoIs/SIs to reach down (or is that up?) to the the root causes of accidents and pre-disposing organisational failures, that the warning signs have been missed all too often. As a result, responsibility for military accident investigation should also be completely removed from the associated chain of command. Because the military is now so small, that means taken away from the MoD itself.
Where is the next airworthiness failure coming from? Who is assessing the threat and mitigation? Is ALARP sufficient - who defines the probabilty and the level of risk? Food for thought?
Flipster