Tuc:-
The MAA have a difficult task, not of their own making, and I wouldn't like to work there. Not because I couldn't do the job. But because I wouldn't be allowed to to the job properly.
Which just about sums up the farce that is UK Military Air Regulation in 2016. This forum will spawn many more such threads as the Air Cadets Grounded one as the dysfunctional state of UK Military Airworthiness bites ever deeper.
The MAA won't do anything because it can't, for the very reason that tucumseh points to, ie that it is not independent of the MOD. It is for that reason that it embraces Haddon-Cave and its false start date of 1998. The wheels fell off a decade before then, thanks to the illegal acts of certain VSOs. It is to protect them that H-C rewrote history, and why the MAA is founded on a false prospectus. It lacks knowledge and the will to reveal the truth, and contents itself in trying to reinvent the wheel, or in this case perfectly good regulations that merely need to be enforced, if only it knew how.
The Royal Air Force has to bite the bullet and acknowledge that its aircraft, and hence its fighting ability, are badly compromised. The only way to start the process of rebuilding its airworthiness is to face the truth and start afresh by making its regulator and air accident investigator independent of the MOD and of each other. What it does about its VSOs that reduced it to this parlous state is for it to decide, but if it goes on protecting them it cannot regain airworthiness. It must choose, and choose wisely.