Tourist, once again you demonstrate you don't know the difference between airworthiness and fitness for purpose, or airworthiness and serviceability.
No he doesn't Dervish. I flew an aircraft for many years that
apparently wasn't "airworthy". Did I worry about it? No, as far as we were concerned it wasn't unairworthy; it may have been unserviceable quite a lot of the time but we were all quire happy to fly it. We have an aircraft here that has flown for many years quite successfully. The "evidence" that is required today simply doesn't exist, so someone has to make a judgement, and that judgement based on 40 or 50 years of flying is it is OK. It might not meet the current standards, but then it is a 40/50 year old design. I have absolutely no doubt that today's 787s/A350s will not meet acceptable airworthiness standards in 40 or 50 years time, or that an unforseen fault despite all of the safety cases in the world will cause one to crash, but that is not going to stop me going on holiday on one this year.
THS
Your examples are a little extreme and somewhat naive. It deosn't really matter what you do with military equipment, someone is going to find a way of defeating you. You might just as well have chosen the example of the
62 ton Challenger - significant armour didn't save that either. I also know quite a few army personnel who thought that Snatch was the best vehicle for patrolling many of the narrow streets in towns and villages in Iraq.