Perhaps a good time to remind people that Leon is quoting his notes from the F3, rather than the GR4. The integration of the IFF may have been a little different...
Correct. The point I made above is that, despite specifying a given performance (including failure warnings) the IFF office took the general view that "It works on the bench, so it'll work on the aircraft" and saw no need to check that it worked end-to-end. That is, verifying it had been integrated correctly and was physically and functionally safe. One "end" being the presentation of warnings and, arguably, reassurance that the crew had been trained to take "immediate action" upon a failure. (The warning is useless unless you know what it is and what to do). On the programme that gave rise to this issue in 1998, the crews had not been trained or the books amended. They fiddled with knobs until a hitherto (and still marked) "spare" actually switched off that annoying noise; rendering them vulnerable to friendly fire. The last is important because IFF office saw no need either for simulator modification or APs. As I said, 2 and 4 Stars agreed with them.
However, as well as being fraudulent, this ethos still causes major problems on programmes where the contract says "Fit equipment x" and the company do so - and MoD has no comeback when they find it doesn't work. "You asked and paid for it to be fitted, it costs more if you want it to work". This has become more prevalent as MoD rids itself of people who understand the concept of systems integration and its link to functional safety. And, crucially, HOW to do integration.
Another factor here is by what method was it fitted. DA Modification or Service Engineered Mod? To install and integrate an IFF with multiple warnings, especially aural, automatically breaches the SEM limits. For a start, the Service DA has no facilities to conduct the necessary integration testing - which in part leads to the "It works on the bench" (as a single LRU) notion. This follows the AMSO/AML decision many years ago to dismantle and destroy as many Integration Rigs as possible as a savings measure exercise, thus preventing even the DA, never mind the Services, from conducting proper testing without major expense and delay. Hence, Haddon-Cave's headline criticism "Savings at the expense of safety". (This precise example is what was given to him in evidence).
Yes, more to this than meets the eye.