JP
Tucumseh. Reading the last few posts again, I am not sure whether you believe that (a) The aircraft was not airworthy, and that therefore the crew cannot be held responsible for anything that happened; or, (b) the aircraft was not airworthy and it was this inadequacy that actually caused the crash. Regards. John Purdey
I have been away but have PM'd you. But, for the open record, my opinion is this;
The BoI and ROs had the cause "Organisational Fault" open to them so were, by definition, duty bound to address this possibility. They did not - it has been noted often that the BoI report does not even mention the word "airworthiness".
The record clearly shows that there
was "Organisational Fault" because the airworthiness regulations were not implemented properly (a la Nimrod) but, far worse, the Boscombe advice on aircraft safety (e.g. the "positively dangerous" statement and gross immaturity of design) was ignored and the facts misrepresented in the CAR and RTS. The act of issuing these Releases clearly implies, to users, that,
inter alia, the design is mature, the installed performance has been established and is satisfactory and the safety audit trail is complete. To misrepresent these facts to Aircrew, especially given the "positively dangerous" warning, is a far greater offence than the Nimrod officers are currently accused of.
My opinion is that, if the BoI/ROs had acknowledged Organisational Fault in the context of Airworthiness (i.e. Safety), then a verdict of Gross Negligence against the pilots would be impossible to sustain unless the same was levelled at those responsible for the airworthiness shambles. In other words the Air Staffs were allowed to be judge and jury in their own case, but were also the "Police" and "CPS" as they decided how the BoI was to be conducted, what they were to investigate and what timeframe was to be assessed.
I cannot say if this lack of airworthiness caused or contributed to the crash, but I have an opinion. Firstly, it is a simple fact that a very significant percentage of the avionic systems had absolutely no clearance whatsoever. That points to Boscombe not having time to establish the installed performance, which in turn informs the Limitations, Cautions, Warnings etc in their CAR recommendations and the FRCs / ACM. (Their recommendation to Controller Aircraft, Sir Donald Spiers, was that he SHOULD NOT sign the CAR).
It is accepted fact that Flt Lt Tapper was so concerned at this dearth of information on, for example, the Nav System, that he took the extraordinary step of visiting the SuperTANS Design Authority in an effort to find out what the problems being experienced meant. For example, the RTS told him that "Error" warnings were "meaningless". Now, I'm no pilot, but I think I'd want to know what an "Error" caption meant on the primary Nav kit I was using (GPS + SuperTANS). It is an astonishing (and negligent) state of affairs not to have mitigated such a Human Factors risk before Release to Service. The very possibility of such a risk occurring should alone be sufficient to give the pilots the benefit of doubt.
I hope this answers your question.