Not surprising !
As we head towards 1500 posts on this thread and two years when no cadet has flown a glider it is no surprise that things have descended in to farce over the last few posts.
Unfortunately I have seen over the past two years the mechanical equivalent of the " non approved thread " where the mechanical task in hand has become subservient to the administrative obligations and has not been done or has been done in a way that was compliant with the administrative obligations but involved 40 man hours work when common sense would have dictated the job required 0.5 of a man hour to complete the task.
Glider maintenance manuals assume a level of competent trade craft and so don't detail things down to the removal of the last screw, it is assumed that the tradesman involved in the maintenance task will be smart enough to know how to do the task without a screw by screw set of instructions.
But recently it would seem that this set of screw by screw instructions for any task IS REQUIRED, I don't quite know why this should be, it could be those with little skill hiding behind regulations, the work shy avoiding doing the job, a management obsessed with paperwork compliance or a number of other reasons.
What I do know is that this would not happen in a commercial operation because it would go bust, my guess is that it is primarily poor leadership from the local management of under skilled staff.
Judging from the rates of pay offered by one contractor recently I can only assume that the skill level inside the company is like the remuneration .......well behind the market.
Over the next six months or so it will be interesting to observe the performance of the legacy contractor recovering the Vigilant aircraft and the new company on the block recovering the Viking aircraft.
Of course the big prize it the VGS support contract that is up for grabs at the end of the year and IMO the MoD split the recovery contract between two contractors ( remember the legacy contractor should have all the facility's in place ) to help judge the performance of the two companies before awarding a ten year contract.
We are going to see a slow return to service of the aircraft over next few months but the long term future of the VGS is dependent on getting the right people to run the support contract, after all event the best leadership from the flying side of the VGS can't run it without aircraft, but with safe aircraft even a lacklustre flying leadership can get cadets flying.