How would the new Duty Holder Concept be applied in cases like this ?
Well, there was nothing wrong with the OLD Duty Holder concept, except that VSOs and senior Civil Servants ruled it should NOT be implemented. Reverse that decision (which the MAA steadfastly choose to ignore) and you revert to a perfectly good system. It remains an offence in the MoD to refuse to obey an order to make a false declaration about airworthiness. The elephant in this particular room.
The relevant MAA Regulatory Instruction opens up by telling the reader it is going to set out the DH concept for airworthiness, then proceeds to discuss Fitness for Purpose. You will recall the C130 IPTL said at the XV179 inquest he didn’t know how to do this. Perhaps this RI is an attempt to teach these basics. However, having actually spoken to a senior MAA officer, I can assure you he did NOT understand the difference between airworthiness and Fitness for Purpose. He did not appreciate that one first attains airworthiness, and before even considering Fitness for Purpose must have a process in place to maintain airworthiness. MoD has always been pretty good at the first, mainly because much of the work is done by Industry, who have a vested interest in selling us an airworthy aircraft or equipment. MoD simply don’t do the other two very well, although both are relatively simple if properly funded and you follow the regs. (The old ones, not the MAA ones).
The RI explains the DH’s legal obligations but not how he goes about meeting his obligation. (This was laid down in a mandated Def Stan, which was cancelled without replacement a few years ago. The MAA’s attempt to describe this process fails miserably – to be fair, by no means the first time our so called regulatory experts have got this completely wrong). One reason why it was cancelled was because the Chief Engineer had decreed in 1992 that it should no longer be updated, ridding MoD of the department that wrote and issued it. The last amendment was May 1991. MoD no longer has a complete copy. It is the Bible and if you don’t know it by heart, you have little or no chance of avoiding the failures that we discuss here.
Another interesting concept is introduced by the MAA (or perhaps imposed upon them). They say “The DH has no right of veto over the MoD planning and programming decisions”. Why this change? The terms of reference of the engineering posts that are now called Requirements Managers used to say they could use “Engineering Judgement” to over-rule Long Term Costing Assumptions (old money). When I was one, I exercised it daily for two years, almost always in the interests of airworthiness, reliability, maintainability and availability. It of course followed that a non-engineer RqM could not fulfil all his ToRs, which has been a weakness of the system for many years now. See Engines’ post in another thread about properly setting Requirements (and, importantly, interpreting them for Industry). That is not to say non-engineer RqMs have no place, but it is self evident they must be a minority in certain domains, complemented by engineering colleagues. But I’ve worked in IPTs which had none and the RqMs, unwittingly, only did a small percentage of what we (programme managers) expected of them.
Summary: DHs will read the RI and scratch their heads asking, “How can we be legally accountable if we have no control whatsoever over the process which delivers and maintains airworthiness?”