Air Cadets grounded?

[Engines]

I've hesitated to post here - the number of posts show that it's a sensitive subject, and my personal experience only goes as far as having once been an ATC cadet. And being an aircraft engineer for around 30 years, including being the Engineering Authority (TAA in new speak) for a front line combat aircraft. So my contribution will be a little general, but hopefully useful.

Positive suggestions - for a fleet of aircraft like this, the recovery should be fairly straightforward. Honestly, it should.

First. Recover configuration control - what is the actual state of the fleet against the approved and cleared design standard? This fleet should not have had many modifications, but there was a report of an unauthorised mod, so some work to be done in that area, but it can't be a big job.

Second. Align the maintenance records against the material state, with repairs probably being the focus. Again, if records are patchy, it's 'check the airframes' time, but honestly, with aircraft like these, the 'hot spots' will be well known and easily inspected. Not a big issue. If GRP repairs are suspect, cut out and re do. Or inspect and monitor. Or, in extremis, replace assemblies (e.g. wings).

Both of these will require the full involvement of the TAA and the CAMO, plus the aircraft Design Authority. They should have the people to provide this support - the MAA have approved their personnel as competent, right? The aircraft must have a DA, otherwise it can't have been operating on the Military Register - right?
The key to success will be a small team of competent, experienced and hard working engineers. A decent SO2 plus a few Chief Techs, with one or two specialists from the DA would have been my start point.

Thirdly, and probably most 'political' (I hate that word, but probably unavoidable now), get an outside agency to conduct a full investigation into how the fleet got to where it did, and what needs to be done to prevent a reoccurrence. If you don't do this, it will happen again somewhere else.

It's here that I would support Chugalug2 (a bit), because it's hard to see where such a review team would come from. Not the organisations that hosted the old EA, or the one that was running the show for the last few years (22Gp?). The MAA? Problematic if they gave this organisation any sorts of approvals. So who? Answers on a postcard, I guess. (The DES Airworthiness Team? The Deputy Head's a Group Captain, so they should be able to cope with this)

The aim is simply stated - build a known and serviceable aircraft fleet and build an organisation that can properly support, maintain and operate them. These aircraft were designed specifically to be low on maintenance and easy to maintain. This is not a challenging engineering target, honestly it's not. If it's being made complicated, it's being got wrong again.

My main observation is that this scandal (and it is a scandal - serious wads of taxpayer pounds have gone into shiny new facilities, big contracts and lots of senior officer salaries, with absolutely no return for two years and a bigger bill coming along) should be out there in the public domain. This is public money hosed down the drain.

It should be embarrassing for the organisations concerned, and people's salaries and pensions should suffer the consequences, if only through the 'soft' options of early retirement and denial of promotion. Had this happened in a commercial outfit, heads would have rolled long ago.

Best regards as ever to those doing the hard work of sorting through the rubble,

Engines