Obviously it is regrettable that military airworthiness provision continues to fall short of the standards that once prevailed, and I hope that some of the evidence presented plus the convening cuthority's comments help tuc et al continue to move their campaign forward. However, as tuc observed, the report does not make airworthiness failings its focus; rather than see this as obfuscation, I see it as a reflection of where the truly shocking failures in this accident occurred.
Now that the report is out I'll be more blunt than in my earlier comments. Airworthiness provision cannot alone deliver safe flying operations. The operating outfit has a responsibility to provide a certain level of personnel competence and appropriate procedures because even the most airworthy equipment will fail if abused. In this case, technical shortcomings went unidentified; how, exactly, was DE&S supposed to identify them until one or the other was laid bare?. That almost falls into the 'bad stuff happens' category for me, so the truly shocking aspect is the degree to which lax supervision and shoddy operating practices demolished the defences which aircrew and techies normally rely on to cope with occasional emergence of 'bad stuff'. All the "ops stuff" as an earlier poster put it is totally relevant - progressive erosion of safety margins created the holes through which this and three other recent avoidable RAFAT accidents could occur (I include the Cranwell gear-up landing).
In hindsight it's evident that the unit culture was rotten - witness the recent 'Reds to wed' business if any further dirty laundry from the preceding OC's tenure is required. If heads are to roll, they're to do with shocking supervision of a squadron that should have been under tight scrutiny given the history of display flying, elite units, three crashes and a fatality (too many coincidences here by far, I'm afraid). It sounds as if the AOC's interest in the programme was based solely on the risk of over-flying the hours (2-star PowerPoint management, anyone?) and beyond that it was "business as usual" in the club. Appalling.
Last edited by Easy Street; 7th Feb 2014 at 08:38.