My particular trade was MPA, we were globally regarded as the best only two years ago. Now apart from a select few scattered around other nations or wiping other fleets arses we have all been Binned.
The majority of the blame for the demise of this capability falls at the feet of CSs( high up the food chain I agree) and a certain Civilian Defense contractor.
There have been a few threads on this but to recap a few verifiable facts;
1. The 1987 policy alluded to by Chugalug (to knowingly waste vast sums of money) was introduced in June 1987 by AMSO, a 3 Star RAF officer.
2. The decision to hide this waste and make up the shortfall by, in part, slashing airworthiness funding and thus actively preventing the maintenance of Safety Cases, was made by his successors, with the support of a single civilian MoD(PE) Director (1 Star).
3. The posts of AMSO and RAF Chief Engineer were then double-hatted and the policy pursued with such rigour that in December 1992 civilian staffs concerned about the adverse effect on aircrew safety were threatened with dismissal by his immediate subordinate, Director General Support Management, an RAF 2 Star (not by coincidence, a mere 3 months after the first coruscating ART report). THAT was the RAF’s official response to being told whole fleets were not airworthy.
And so on.........
Throughout this period (87-06, in my personal experience) not one single senior RAF officer paid heed to numerous direct and dire warnings as to the effect of these actions which, time after time, linked waste and lack of airworthiness. The record shows the only formal warnings to 2 Star and above were from Civil Servants, culminating (in the case of Nimrod) in a written warning to Adam Ingram MP, Minister of State for the Armed Forces, in mid-2005. He was advised by these senior staffs there was no airworthiness problem whatsoever and, incredibly, issued this denial some months
after XV230 crashed.
Ingram and his senior staffs were made to look utter fools by the Nimrod Review, a fact never reported by the press or, disgracefully, Haddon-Cave himself. Had he done so, the Nimrod Review would have had to take a completely different view of the systemic failings, naming all the above senior staffs. No action has been taken over him being grossly misled and, I suspect, these fools now form part of the new airworthiness structure, as the avoidable loss of aircrew and assets is water off their cowardly backs.
Where you are absolutely right about Civil Service involvement is at 2 Star level in MoD(PE) / DPA. These same detailed warnings were regularly passed to Director General Air Systems 2 (essentially, all Rotary Wing and Maritime) from 1996-on. As I have said many times, it is a simple fact that in 1999-00 (at the very time Nimrod RMPA/2000/MRA4 was getting into real trouble) he made various written rulings that it was acceptable to deliver functionally unsafe aircraft to the Services, knowing them to be so, but to falsely declare they were safe. In this ruling, he (inadvertently or otherwise), reflected the actions of the Assistant Chief of the Air Staffs in November 1993, when he knowingly released an unairworthy Chinook HC Mk2 to Service. His 4 Star, the Chief of Defence Procurement (a civilian, but retired Admiral) upheld these rulings in 2001. In between, the (civilian) 3 Star in DPA simply did not reply to the written warnings he was given. Their actions, to a man, were criminal. The said 2 Star was the person the Public Accounts Committee declined to name when describing the lack of management oversight on Chinook Mk3 as the “gold standard cock-up”; his sole raison d’être being to provide such oversight. (At the time, they didn’t realise the scale of the Nimrod cock-up, which is presumably Gold+).
Recently, MoD has formally admitted lack of airworthiness was a factor in the scrapping of MRA4. Whose job was it, on a day to day basis, to be satisfied that the inducted aircraft (MR2) was airworthy (a critical dependency for the MRA4 programme)? The IPT leaders for MR2 and MRA4 (in DLO and DPA respectively). Both, as far as I recall, were RAF officers. Astonishingly, one (the more senior) was praised in the Nimrod Review, which (in my opinion) reflected a senior level campaign and collusion to scapegoat a few junior officers (Baber & Eagles) who were victims of the above policies.
I’m afraid the verifiable facts speak for themselves. In this context, the RAF has been let down by its (very) senior officer cadre for 25 years. During that time, many Civil Servants fought to overturn their policies and practices, but were themselves let down by a small number of their own seniors. These names are, in the main, in the public domain, having been permitted to be judge and jury in their own cases.
Finally, I am saddened to see comments about loss of MPA without mentioning the avoidable deaths of colleagues. The two are inextricably linked. MoD and the RAF don’t want them to be, but you must always remind them if we are to avoid recurrence.