Ah yes, the Chinook! Well, let's leave that one aside for a moment, as many people seem to be suffering from 'Mull fatigue' - not least the MoD! Suffice to say that there is plenty of substantiated written evidence to show that the Chinook's regulatory airworthiness process fell well short of competence and fitness-for-purpose. Ultimately, I believe, this led to the crew unknowingly flying an aircraft that was definitively not safe at the time (whether that had any influence of the crash we cannot say).
But Mull is only the tip of the iceberg - take Nimrod, Hercules, Tornado, Sea King accidents - they all point to a broken down system of engineering design and oversight as having some bearing on the crashes. The breakdown of this process had its roots in poor budgetary decisions taken in the 1980's/90's which, in turn, led to the decimation of the airworthiness regulatory system of engineering husbandry/oversight. Furthermore, until the Nimrod in 2006, no RAF Board of Inquiry/Service Investigation dared to go there - bravo Air Commodore Clive Loader - it was his direction that led to most of the truth coming out in the BoI, the Coroner's Inquest and eventually the Haddon-Cave Review. As Chug says, at least 62 deaths- the total is probably a lot more - are directly attributable to this failed system of regulator, investigator and operator being one and the same.
Now the military has a new 'independent' Military Aviation Authority (MAA) and the Military Air Accident Investigation Branch (MAAIB), supposedly directly reporting to the Permanent Under Secretary of State (PUS) - which is at least a step in the right direction. But the reality is that MAA/MAAIB are still part of the higher-level MoD and so, by definition, 'undue influence' can still be brought to bear on the MAA. I believe it makes much more sense for the MAA/MAAIB to be totally removed from the military clique and be subsumed as a sub-section of the CAA/AAIB. This way, the MAA/MAAIB would gain even more independence from the insidious tentacles of the MoD hierarchy.
But that's not the whole problem. The MoD has retained very little engineering/regulatory experience in any of the Integrated Project Teams which do many of the tasks of the old 'Procurement Executive'. This lack of experience occured because of the way that the RAF airworthiness engineers were 'marginalised' in the many organisational changes of the 1990s - when logisitcians and non-engineering civil-servants took over the decision-making reins and the airworthiness chain was side-lined. Sadly, many good engineers retired and took with them their considerable experience and expertise and the MoD did nothing to discourage this bleeding of experience - itself against the regulations. Added to which, in the 1990s, the process of maintaining airworthiness took a 28% budget cut - 3 years in a row! I don't know if or how the MAA will ever recover the knowledge or the funding required to turn back the clock to a time when we had effective oversight of military aircraft safety.
Another stumbling block is that many of the incompetents (and their acolytes) who drove these policies in the 1990s and early 2000s are still serving - some at higher-levels or in consultancy. It is these bad apples that have the caused the rot but until their cavalier attitude to safety is wiped from the collective mindset, the MAA faces an uphill task to truly make safety a higher, if not the highest, priority and not the MoD's usual rhetoric - to which 62 souls can attest as a fallacy.
What is this thread doing on a technical forum? I hear you ask. Yes, there are similar threads on the military fora but I think we might all benefit if we were to hear from those who are our civilian brethren and counterparts - how/why does the CAA/EASA regulate and oversee airworthiness better (if they do) and why/how their practices could be adopted by MAA (if they aren't already).
Ultimately, we share the same bits of sky when we fly and military aircraft fly over our houses and over those of friends and families. The apparent lack of military airworthiness oversight concerns us all. To fail to address the issues above will mean more accidents in the future and as our military is shrinking to minuscule numbers, we cannot afford to lose a single aircraft (or their even-more-valuable crews) just because of a systemic lack of good engineering design/oversight.
(Incidently, another RAAF investigation into the F1-11 crash at Palau Aur was subject such 'undue influence' from above. 'Aircrew Error' was cited again but without the evidence to back it up. There was a concerted effort by the families and eventually the RAAF fessed up and admitted their errors of assessment and poor oversight.)