Air Cadets grounded?

[Engines]

Cats,

Very good point - yes, repairs to structurally significant bits of composite require careful scarfing and insert repairs - but that's been true since the days of wooden aircraft. Nothing new or unexpected. I seem to remember that Grob Astirs came in four main bits - one fuselage, two wings and one tailplane. I'm not sure if they were interchangeable between aircraft, but with an outfit like Grob I'd have expected them to be. That should have been in the requirements document in any case. That would help recover a large fleet like this. You're also right that any proper composite repair is barely detectable from the outside - but it would be very visible from the inside. A decent set of flexiscopes and a hole here or there and a full check of the interior could be done without too much trouble. Or NDT. But we shouldn't really have to be resorting to this sort of approach. The real problem here is that we are talking about the RAF a having large fleet of aircraft with an unreliable record of airframe repairs. I can't stress how improbable this sounds to engineers like me. Please let me explain why.

In the first instance, most repairs to a damaged aircraft should have been preceded with an incident report. Back in the days before the MAA, the rules were fairly simple - if an aircraft sustained any damage requiring a repair, an incident report would have been raised, even if the damage were found post flight. There's 'Point One' of the data trail.

Next, a Work Order with a SNOW number plus a special code to identify it as a repair. Those details were all held on the computers at MACD, and searchable. Point Two. The mantra was always 'No Work Order - No Work'. Next, if the repair was outside the limits set out in the Topic 6, a repair scheme would have been required from the RAF Repair and Salvage Unit (used to be at Abingdon, then moved to St Athan, I think). RSU would have records of their repair activity. Point Three

Any repair to an airframe, inside or outside Topic 6 limits, should have been recorded on the Airframe Log Card - this is part of the records held by the owning unit that allow the engineers (and aircrew) to know what the configuration of the aircraft was (delivery standard (details in the log card pack) plus mods (in the log card pack) plus repairs). Point Four. Once completed, the Work Orders would have been retained then sent to storage. Point Five. Were these aircraft on LITS? If so, there would have been a Point Six.

The reason I'm (probably) boring the pants off any aircrew reading this is that there is a robust, comprehensive and (above all) easily managed system that exists to control and record what the hell the aircrew are signing out when they go flying. What we seem to have here is a situation where not one of the data sets that should have been kept were properly kept. Nor did anyone seem to notice that they weren't being properly kept. I can't try hard enough to get over to our aircrew brethren how strange and improbable this whole thing sounds. We recorded all our repairs not because we were a race of superior beings who couldn't make a mistake, but because it was just the routine, normal, easy, standard, commonplace, obvious, way we did things. Not recording a repair would have run against so many parts of basic training that I would have viewed it as 'nearly impossible'.

Something serious has gone wrong here, and very probably systemic in nature. Anyone climbing into an RAF aircraft who assumes that "Oh, that was just a problem for ATC gliders" is probably making a mistake. Let's have the facts, so let's keep supporting Coff.

Best Regards as ever to those trying to join up the dots,

Engines