Engines
Thank you.
My take on this is that there is a convoluted history of who has been contracted by MoD. When discussing airworthiness and the safety case the important contract is PDS, not spares, repairs or production. On the others, "all" you have to do is follow the regs and normal good practice. The contracts have tangible outputs and success can be measured. PDS, to most, is an intangible. It is not volume related. Most of it costs the same if you have one or one thousand aircraft. The supply manager AMSO decision to lump it together with the others revealed a dangerous lack of understanding, and MoD has never recovered. For 25 years PDS has taken a pro rata hit with every cutback, which became (to coin a phrase) positively dangerous by about 1996. Demonstrably, 99% of the problems we discuss on here, and most of the recommendations in the Nimrod Review and many BoI reports, amount to "implement mandated PDS regs".
My gut feeling here is that, in the dim and distant past, there was a valid safety case or, as it used to be called, safety argument. Then, PDS was run down, or the contract handed to an inappropriate organisation whose contract no longer called up the regs; which were eventually scrapped without replacement some years ago. Lack of configuration control is the giveaway, and CDP) admitted the systemic failings to the Public Accounts Committee in March 1999.
This is precisely the problem the Nimrod IPT faced in April 1999 (that date again). The dreadful decision by Haddon-Cave to name and shame Gp Capt Baber ignored the fact that decisions of 1991 militated against him having a valid safety case. He let a contract to resurrect it, which he should have been praised for. H-C conveniently omitted to mention who allowed this situation to develop - instead praising it as the "golden period". (And therein lies the link to the RAeS). That CDP had admitted the failings the previous month, simply highlighted the fact he should have stepped forward in 2009 to tell Haddon-Cave he was wrong.
Yes, the truth is coming out, but as ever it is merely a minor variation on what was exposed on Chinook, Nimrod, Hercules, Sea King, Hawk, Tornado and more. Any "campaign" or letters to the media has to emphasise this point. Not a single word of this is new.