Haraka:-
[How would we have coped in the RAF with the accident rates in the fifties with all this nonsense? ("Tragedies", "Heros", all round etc.)
I'm not sure that they did cope, witness the accident rate that you quote. How we coped in the 60's was to create a Flight Safety Organisation that was then second to none. As it was gradually refined into the 70's, statistics built up from the reporting system were fed back to ensure that problems were identified and dealt with before they caused avoidable accidents. Thus Force levels were maintained and operational capacity retained. The reason why it worked is because everyone in the chain, from Air Marshal to Airman wanted it to work. Then came the late 80's when certain Air Marshals had more important things on their minds, like finding money to replace that which they had already squandered. Flight Safety, previously a protected species, was seen as a milch cow to that end. Orders were issued to suborn the Regulations but sign them off as complied with. Those who did not comply (mainly engineers) were shipped out and replaced with non-engineers only too willing to obey. Thus started the rot which not only led to airworthiness related fatal accidents but even more tellingly to the loss of professional knowledge required to repair the system when the time came. After Haddon Cave the time was deemed to have arrived. The answer, as so often with Defence, was to invent new organisations with lots of mission statements. Despite these the MAA lacks two vital ingredients; independence from the Operator (the MOD and its Service subsidiaries), and the Professional knowledge to rebuild a system now reduced to rubble.
The Royal Air Force has to face up to this scandal and lance the boil by acting against those VSO's who perpetrated this sabotage. Only then will the need to reform the system and for Regulation and Air Accident Investigation to be separate and independent of both the MOD and of each other be acknowledged. Failing that, avoidable air accidents will carry on needlessly reducing the operational war fighting capacity of the RAF in both lost lives and materiel.
Find out the cause of the accident ( if possible), implement the lessons learned and then move on.
So easy to say, so very very difficult now to achieve...