Nutloose,
My thoughts exactly. The recovery process for this fleet should have been fairly straightforward.
The number of calendar, usage or fatigue lifed components on these aircraft has to be tiny. The gliders mainly consist of a collection of lumps of glass fibre, which I would expect to be maintained by regular visual inspections for impact image or possibly crazing. Yes, there might be repairs, but these should be fairly obvious. Again, the standard of the repairs should be apparent from a visual examination, or in extremis an NDT check would help establish the condition.
As Cats Five says, if all else fails, it's remove the repair and replace - but that's not a big deal on these airframes. In extremis, scrap the affected part.
The key point here is that recovery of this fleet would be fairly straightforward if the documentation set was in anything like the condition it should have been in. (Non-recording of repairs is something that, unless this had happened, I would have considered almost incredible). The time taken so far to sort this out shows that there could have been a severe breakdown right across the whole documentation trail that I outlined in a previous post. I sincerely hope I'm wrong here.
I'd like to see as many PPruners as possible start applying pressure across the MoD and Government establishment to get a proper investigation carried out, with the results published.
Best Regards as ever to those working through the docs,
Engines