So, to summarise.
We have a known problem where the result of a failure is a bomb-bay fire. The solution to allow flying to continue, inspections, is not, at the General' own admission, effective; the bracket failing between the pre-flight inspection and the flight.
Prior to the flight, Bogdan said, the bracket had seemed to be holding. “We inspected, it looked fine, and it just didn’t look fine in the air,” he said.
And the solution? More frequent inspections......
In the wake of the fire, the Marine Corps opted not to ground any aircraft or pause flight operations. Officials did, however, update the inspection regimen to make assessment of the faulty brackets more rigorous, Bogdan said.
Was this the result of a vigorous risk assessment that reached a balanced decision?
Until we fix that bracket, every airplane of the B-model that doesn’t have that bracket is going to have to be inspected, and hopefully that bracket remains in place when it’s flying.”
So, who holds this risk for the UK F-35Bs?