Nice Castle, the syndrome that you describe is both depressing and familiar, for others too have complained of the bureaucratic morass that "safety" has now become in HM aviation. The irony is of course, as you and others so rightly point out, that as well as being a pain in the proverbial, it actively reduces operational effectiveness and.... well, safety! The apparatchiks setting about rebuilding UK Military Airworthiness from Year Zero will have much the same effect as Pol Pot did.
As tuc repeatedly reminds us, it was not the existing Regulations that were the problem, but simply that they were deliberately suborned in accordance with orders from the highest levels! Better to get back to enforcing them, you would have thought, before completely and continuously revising them. Unbelievably the dilemma is that many of the Regulations were pulped even as those who were experienced in their implementation were sacked. So the MAA finds itself with a barren wasteland but, like many an RAF Board of Inquiry before them, under strict orders not to ask why.
If this were but a case of blundering staffing bogged down in endless paperwork one could sympathise but shrug it off with a "Well, what can you do?". But this is aviation and it doesn't tolerate such fatalism. 62 people have died in UK Military Air Accidents featured in this forum alone. The real total is almost certainly very much higher, but we shall never know because they were investigated by the very operator that suffered them.
Airworthiness related Military Air Accidents will go on happening, and the death-toll will go on rising, because the Regulator, the Operator, and the Investigator, are one and the same. Both Regulation and Investigation are as prone to unwarranted interference as ever, no matter what the sign says at the gate.
If that isn't the case why doesn't the MAA state unequivocally that Haddon-Cave's "Golden Age" of Airworthiness provision was in reality one of corruption, gross negligence, and deceit? It was in that "Golden Age" that illegal RTS's were issued to knowingly unairworthy types and the ARTs, that desperate attempt by DFS to air the scandal, were buried without ceremony.
The longer this scandal grinds on the longer the RAF's honour is sullied and the longer its aircraft will lack airworthiness. It has to bite the bullet, come clean, and face up to the gross betrayal by its leadership. Meanwhile the MAA and MAAIB must be released from the thrall of the MOD and be given real independence to get on with their vital work of avoiding avoidable accidents.
Last edited by Chugalug2; 20th Sep 2012 at 00:42.