Tourist
Beagle is entitled to his opinion like anyone else and although he is no longer flying the VC10, he was one of the best operators of his generation, and with a few thousand hours on the VC10 flight deck, he has a fair idea of what procedures are in place.
Back to the point - the VC10 flies all over the world (right now) carrying exercise and operational pax. It sometimes carries these pax with a couple of fast jets attached to its backside, whilst discharging lots of fuel at quite high speeds..... not exactly civilian SOP.
Risk assessment i get, changing the rules as to what is acceptable today, is not tomorrow, oh, but we need it to do this task so its ok again the day after... is a pain in the ass.