Tourist, there is absolutely no question that your position on this will be fulfilled. RJ simply joins all the other fleets that are known to be unairworthy, suspected of being unairworthy, or at least cannot be assumed to be airworthy. That is the reality of present day UK Military Aviation.
So we are not in conflict over that. My point is that for the future of UK Military Aviation we should agree upon taking the necessary steps of changing all that and slowly (and like all things that have been broken in an instance, it will be a long and slow process of repair) begin to reattain the process of airworthiness provision that no longer exists.
RJ proves, if nothing else, the irrelevance that is the present MAA. It has known that since inception RJ could never be issued with an RTS iaw the regulations. That merely resulted in the farce at Waddington until the SoS did what everyone expected him to do, and now one has been issued. Result! Well hardly, because as the DG MAA reminds us, it still doesn't accord with the regs and almost certainly never will.
Either we get to grips with this scandal and start the process of reverse by making the MAA and the MAAIB independent of the MOD and of each other, or we scrap them and leave the whole rotten mess in the maws of the MOD which created it anyway.
The MAA and MAAIB are worse than useless because they create an aura of respectability to a process driven by ignorance, incompetence, and gross negligence. If they hang around as is they will simply be kept busy overseeing a steadily increased airworthiness related accident rate that they were supposed to prevent. An expensive and pointless exercise in sheer waste.