Short Fat One
The safety concerns to which I refer involve shoddy workmanship from the contractors at Woodford not changes in regulations. I suspect all the decent workforce left to other jobs a while ago when they knew the writing was on the wall for their jobs. After all over 50% of the workforce on Nimrod at Woodford were contractors by 2010.
Furthermore, was it not the case that all RAF personnel had been banned from flying on MRA4 this summer due to safety concerns?
Had BAE built the RAF the aircraft they promised and not used the MOD as a cash cow, then it would be in service having demonstrated some capability since type acceptance and not sat on the ground for most of last year.
Let me again stress that we should not have given up the capability as I throughly believe it is still required, but we needed to stop BAE taking us for a ride financially.