Twos In
I think you are correct about the SI panel itself. While one could legitimately argue many BoI/SI members are manifestly unsuitable for the job through lack of training, knowledge or experience, the vast majority do their best. In the same way very many "project managers" in DE&S and its predecessors were never trained to do the job, try their best, but fail to deliver because they haven't been taught the basics. (There's no one left to teach them).
But the issue I and, I believe, others have is the restrictive ToRs of these inquiries, which actively prevent them digging deeper to make sense of the evidence they hear. The result, time after time, is the reports list the same old recommendations. And the penny never drops that all they are doing is recommending application of mandated regs or plain common sense. The Airworthiness Review Teams of the 90s were the same. Chief Engineer Alcock specifically instructed the team leaders, through the Inspector of Flight Safety (RAF), that under no circumstances were the ARTs to go near MoD's airworthiness experts. Such directives immediately raise suspicions. Who are they designed to protect? The reports went to two people; the two with most to lose if their policies and directives became public (i.e. CE and ACAS). When they DID become public, largely by luck (the by now elderly CHART Leader making contact), they lost the biggest case of all and retreated.
Where I believe "nobbling" has taken place is at Reviewing Officer level and above, including the MAA. It is the system, designed to prevent recurrence, that is nobbled. The result is recurring systemic failures. I cited blatant lies in this Tornado case, and this lying has been proven beyond any doubt on Chinook, Sea King ASaC (perhaps the worst yet least explored case), C130, Nimrod etc. These are, frankly, illegal acts. If the MAA were ignorant as well as incompetent it would be bad enough, but they are not ignorant of these facts. They have been presented to the MAA in the presence of Ministers, and they have done nothing.
May I suggest people read up on Tornado ZG710 (March 2003 Patriot shootdown). On the face of it a different set of circumstances, but the root failures are EXACTLY the same. That is, predictable, predicted, notified and ignored. Any reasonable person would ask just what was going on in that area of MoD.
So who has the best interests of aircrew at heart? And who lies to protect the guilty? I know who I'd want on my side.
Fox3 & Dervish
In this particular case I would not be so critical of DE&S/DPA/PE. Their role was to support OR with advice and assistance. As I said, the solution was at a lower level, and procurers should never have been presented with the problem. However, when it became a problem, the procurers would have known it was coming but clearly didn't do very much. We need to know why, yet neither the SI nor the MAA go there. This supine acceptance of critical safety failures is entirely typical of what was going on in Haddon-Cave's "Golden Period" and continues today.
I agree with stripping half the management layers!