“We’ve asked some difficult questions. That’s why we were created.” Air Vice-Marshal Martin Clark
No, you were created because the people who asked difficult questions were disciplined and told to shut up, their superiors told lies, unsafe aircraft were released to service, and people died. Then the people who asked the difficult questions posed them again, to Coroner's Courts. MoD again tried to shut them up, told lies and unsafe aircraft continued to be released - and maintain that position despite the formation of the MAA.
“There’s no Crown immunity,” Garwood confirmed.
Knew that. My 1992 letter of delegation tells me so. Please keep up.
Now the MAA is reviewing the regulations “to make them better,” he added. There is broad agreement that they already read much better than before, Clark claimed.
That's sod all use if they start by getting the basic definitions wrong. They may read better, but they don't say the right thing. There is a difference.
In the annual report, the MAA warned that “the lack of suitable qualified and experienced personnel…is a strategic risk to a self-sustaining safety system and culture.” It painted a rather alarming picture of “air safety being undermined by work that is left incomplete; safety modification work not being progressed; poor supervision; latent risks that remain unqualified, and inappropriate normalization of low standards and behaviors.”
And, like Haddon-Cave, it simply repeats 24 year old reports containing the same warnings, but doesn't acknowledge this.
The MAA then audits this work. “We mark their homework,” AM Garwood said.
But who teaches them? And have they the necessary pre-requisite experience and competence to be successfully taught?
Garwood emphasized the independence of the MAA. “I report directly to the permanent undersecretary at the MoD, but I have access to the Defence Secretary (for example, the senior defense minister). I’m independent of the service chiefs,” he added.
And yet, DE&S policy section continues to speak for the MAA when confirming it remains an offence to refuse to disobey an order to make a false declaration on airworthiness, but it is not an offence to issue that order. The elephant, Dick.
