It would seem now that the finding of a root cause, followed by the approval of an RTF procedure and any inspection/remediation, will have to precede any flight operations
Good. The aircraft is still in its development stage. Development programmes cannot be expected to swallow a fixed date event in any reliable way. Throw in a demanding set of sorties and a complex deployment and you really are pushing your engineering luck.
The incident that caused this current grounding is pure gold from an engineering and development point of view and will improve the eventual quality of the breed because all the evidence of what went wrong is sitting safely on the ground at a home base. Imagine if the same thing had happened en route to the UK and the aircraft had been lost at sea. Now what do you do?
Funnily enough I was involved with a rather similar exercise back in 1980. MacAir was developing the AV-8B to have twice the payload radius of the AV-8A. The only aircraft at that time was a single YAV-8B (an ex USMC A model now fitted with the big wing with large flaps and better intake as proposed for the B). MacAir wanted to ferry the aircraft to the UK then show at Farnborough how much better this aircraft was compared to the Harrier. Well I ask you how on earth could one do that? (all the normal Harrier VSTOL manoeuvres would look just the same to both the trade and the public).
However, despite my protestations, three weeks before Farnborough I found myself at Whiteman AFB with the Y model trying to work up a convincing display. I did have an idea that showed promise but whenever I tried to work on it the aircraft developed snag after snag. It was a one off airframe with related spares issues and I became convinced it would let us down in the UK. Of course nobody wanted to scrub the exercise.
Taxying out for yet another rehearsal attempt on 16 Aug the nose suddenly dropped as the nose oleo collapsed. Fortunately there was not another leg available in time so the aircraft and I had our way.