PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Should Regulators and Investigators always be Separate and Independent of Operators?
Old 10th Oct 2011, 17:53
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Chugalug2
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: West Sussex
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IGh:
If only the problem of INVESTIGATOR-err could be solved so easily.
Point taken IGh, and I for one do not take issue with you, for the NTSB is not alone in its sometime partial objectivity! But at least it is not employed directly by said big company. That is the issue with military aviation in the UK and, I suspect, elsewhere. Here the MOD is effectively both Regulator and Investigator. Thus if it makes a bodge of the first by, for instance, issuing a Controller Aircraft Release and a Release to Service to a knowingly grossly unairworthy aircraft type that shortly thereafter suffers an airworthiness related fatal air accident, it then ends up theoretically investigating its own shortcomings. In reality it doesn't of course, preferring instead to "discover" the alleged shortcomings of others.
No-one can claim that any system is fool proof, let alone scoundrel proof, but the self regulation and self investigation of military aviation is plainly partial, and no amount of Chinese walls or separate HQ's can alter that.
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