RAF looking at the possibilities of replacing the complete Chinook fleet.
Shows that calling the change from Mark 1 to Mark 2 some 13-15 years after it (finally!) entered service a "Mid Life Update" was way short of the mark, eh? Do hope any refurbishment/replacement programme is better-organised and better-run than that fiasco (shouldn't be difficult).
Shows that calling the change from Mark 1 to Mark 2 some 13-15 years after it (finally!) entered service a "Mid Life Update" was way short of the mark, eh? Do hope any refurbishment/replacement programme is better-organised and better-run than that fiasco (shouldn't be difficult).
Not sure I completely agree. One thing we are and have always been short of is ‘quality’ medium lift ie Chinook. Reducing platform numbers does not really help this problem. Just ends up being less with less and the same high demand. Rather than concentrate on numbers, define the requirement; then judge what you can do with what is left and make this the policy....
I think you’re referring to the introduction of the Mk 3
Similar to Mk3. When it was a simple Mk2 follow-on buy, it was basically a minor task. As soon as HQ wanted a split Mk2/3, planning blight should have been declared as there was nobody to take on the task.
No hindsight involved. It's easier to list those who didn't warn senior staff. The 2 Star happened to be the same one as RMPA/Nimrod 2000/MRA4. It's a small world in that part of MoD.
Goat-cluster is harsh on goats.
tuc:-
Indeed, let's call it for what it is, a VSO cluster! Chinook Mk2, Mk3, Nimrod Mk2, MRA4, they all have one thing in common; the bullying, incompetent, and negligent VSOs who presided over those scandals. They go on being protected while the UK Military Airfleets become ever more infected by a pandemic of unairworthiness. If Covid-19 had indeed been deliberately released on the world by a malevolent state you would be ill advised to take advise from it on how it might be stopped, yet that is exactly the fate of UK Military Airworthiness.
It was deliberately subverted by RAF VSOs set on plundering the Air Safety budgets to pay for the results of a disastrous AMSO policy. Their actions have been officially covered up ever since and the resultant airworthiness related fatal air accidents that inevitably followed were blamed on hapless 1*'s, SO's, and most scandalous of all, deceased JO's! That cover up has been upheld by the RAF Star Chamber ever since. And the guardian of UK Military Airworthiness, the MAA (an MOD subsidiary that is of course completely "independent" of the MOD!), perpetuates the myth that the very time that subversion occurred was a "Golden Period" of Air Safety! Birds of a feather?
Just like Covid-19, aviation isn't interested in good intentions. Given half a chance either one will do its best to kill you if not checked. Lack of airworthiness is a sure way to help aviation do just that. That is why Air Regulation and Accident Investigation must be independent of the MOD and of each other.
Self Regulation Doesn't Work and in Aviation it Kills!
Goat-cluster is harsh on goats.
It was deliberately subverted by RAF VSOs set on plundering the Air Safety budgets to pay for the results of a disastrous AMSO policy. Their actions have been officially covered up ever since and the resultant airworthiness related fatal air accidents that inevitably followed were blamed on hapless 1*'s, SO's, and most scandalous of all, deceased JO's! That cover up has been upheld by the RAF Star Chamber ever since. And the guardian of UK Military Airworthiness, the MAA (an MOD subsidiary that is of course completely "independent" of the MOD!), perpetuates the myth that the very time that subversion occurred was a "Golden Period" of Air Safety! Birds of a feather?
Just like Covid-19, aviation isn't interested in good intentions. Given half a chance either one will do its best to kill you if not checked. Lack of airworthiness is a sure way to help aviation do just that. That is why Air Regulation and Accident Investigation must be independent of the MOD and of each other.
Self Regulation Doesn't Work and in Aviation it Kills!
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Looking at this you can see why it might make sense
https://www.defensenews.com/global/a...ing-new-helos/
https://www.defensenews.com/global/a...ing-new-helos/
The lawmaker, who sits on the National Assembly’s Defense Committee, said the research concluded in September that the cost of upgrading 17 of the 43 CH-47D Chinook helicopters would be about 1.35 trillion won ($1.2 billion), which is higher than the estimated cost of 1.22 trillion won for buying new ones.
The upgrade cost is partly driven by the fact that Chinook manufacturer Boeing no longer produces parts for older variants, like those owned by South Korea, so specially ordered parts could prove expensive, Min said, citing the research conducted by the Defense Agency for Technology and Quality, which is affiliated with DAPA.
The upgrade cost is partly driven by the fact that Chinook manufacturer Boeing no longer produces parts for older variants, like those owned by South Korea, so specially ordered parts could prove expensive, Min said, citing the research conducted by the Defense Agency for Technology and Quality, which is affiliated with DAPA.
Chugalug2 - and the MAA just keeps generating more pointless hoops to jump through in an effort to prove that paper-safety = real airworthiness (it doesn't) with more bow-ties and safety cases than you can shake a stick at. Keeps career officers in a job but not much else.
Originally Posted by [email protected]
Chugalug2 - and the MAA just keeps generating more pointless hoops to jump through in an effort to prove that paper-safety = real airworthiness (it doesn't) with more bow-ties and safety cases than you can shake a stick at. Keeps career officers in a job but not much else.
So the MAA kicks off with a Year Zero and attempts to rebuild the UK Military Air Safety from its shattered remains. As the man from the Nationwide BS commented, "it doesn't work like that!", and it never will. The only organisation in the UK with an uninterrupted knowledge and expertise in Airworthiness Regulation now is the CAA. Apart from the urgent need to wrest Air Regulation out of the maw of the MOD, the advantage of doing so would be to sister a reformed MAA (with a new civil Director General) alongside the CAA. I have no doubt that neither party would welcome such a marriage, but it would give access to the expertise and knowledge that the MAA is so lacking in. Only then could the long painful rebuilding of airworthiness in the UK Military Airfleets begin.
Ditto all the above with the MilAAIB (or whatever the latest signwriting variant is now hanging outside the front door) to the AAIB. Then, and only then, can Military Air Accident Investigations be able to gain full access to all the evidence previously withheld from BoIs and SIs by commission or omission. We can then expect some real horror stories emerging into the cold and un-cosy outside world.
I imagine there will be some considerable resistance to my suggestions above, not least because the MAA would have to admit that their foundation stone was made of sand and the cover up would have to be uncovered to reveal the dross that lays beneath.
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The only organisation in the UK with an uninterrupted knowledge and expertise in Airworthiness Regulation now is the CAA
No, I will say something, the CAA is a shadow of its past, gutted from what was an excellent and knowledgeable institution often manned by licenced personal that knew their business, this has been replaced by a shambolic and vastly undermanned organisation of civil servants on the whole that was cut to the core as services transferred to EASA and are now expected to regain those lost skills and knowledge with a vastly undermanned staff.
Areas once the backbone of common sense and safety have been thrown to the wind like confetti, an example is the Light Aircraft Maintenance Programme or LAMP as it was known.
True it had its faults, but it was the backbone of maintenance in setting minimum inspection requirements on aircraft and ensuring the GA fleets in the UK were maintained to a set standard, all be it what could be seen as a minimum, but never the less a standard.
Gone, now you might think what are we using now, the manufacturer’s schedules? No, we are having to write our own maintenance programmes, which really means several things, standardisation is gone and the ability for different companies to maintain one aircraft with the minimum of disruption to a standard has disappeared, programmes could be written to do even less and err towards being financially oriented against safety.
Additionally the main driver behind this appears to be to be to protect the CAA from being sued by pushing the responsibility for airworthiness onto the "customer" as opposed to the authority, It also makes it harder for companies to maintain a visiting aircraft, the idea that the maintenance company that looks after an aircraft has to provide their maintenance programme they have spent monies on producing to a competitor, so that they can use it sort of throws the idea and legality of intellectual property to the wind.
Even the CAA so called less regulation is creating more as one finds oneself having to write maintenance programmes for all the aircraft under ones control, and that is an individual program for every individual aircraft as well as changing the format of the schedules, but also rewriting the companies exposition and then re applying to continue to do the same thing........ And don't ask about Licences.
The CAA are not the be all and end all of it, and no matter how much paperwork you throw at it, safety does NOT improve, in fact the opposite, those that never did the job correctly in the first place will simply ignore the latest paperwork trail and carry one as before, while those who are diligent will find themselves with more onerous legislation to plough through with no advantages.
Hey that was almost a rant....
I'm very glad that you did decide to comment, Nutty, thank you! If the outlook for UK civil regulation is as bleak as you say, and I for one have no reason to doubt you, then all the more reason for the CAA to get its own house in order, before our dear EU friends (as I understand is the approved way of referring to them) ban all UK civil aviation from their airspace. It might start by trying to lure back those who saw a future for themselves with EASA. It might also just be that there arises an equal and opposing force repelling them by our dear EU friends. Who knows?
I don't for one moment see the CAA as any sort of Regulatory panacea. Those of us who have had to earn a crust while under their benevolent bureaucracy can vouch for the never ending bumph and extortionate charges they are minded to levy. In their favour though, I very much doubt if they have ever deliberately sought to subvert and suborn their own airworthiness regulations and thereafter protect the perpetrators, thus obstructing any possibility of reforming the dysfunctional system their malevolence would have caused.
It is no solution to shrug our shoulders and say that UK civil and military airworthiness is going to hell in a handcart but what can we do? I'll tell you what aviation will do, take its toll of human life as though it were Christmas! I hope that we can agree that Regulator, Investigator, and Operator must be truly independent of each other to ensure Air Safety, or it cannot work. At the moment that is precisely the situation in UK Military Aviation. Until we can ensure that independence, avoidable accidents and needless fatalities will continue unnecessarily.
Air Power, the whole raison d'etre of military aviation, will suffer accordingly. One day the RAF will once again be pitted against a comparable opponent. Too late then to discover that there is something wrong with our bloody aircraft!
I don't for one moment see the CAA as any sort of Regulatory panacea. Those of us who have had to earn a crust while under their benevolent bureaucracy can vouch for the never ending bumph and extortionate charges they are minded to levy. In their favour though, I very much doubt if they have ever deliberately sought to subvert and suborn their own airworthiness regulations and thereafter protect the perpetrators, thus obstructing any possibility of reforming the dysfunctional system their malevolence would have caused.
It is no solution to shrug our shoulders and say that UK civil and military airworthiness is going to hell in a handcart but what can we do? I'll tell you what aviation will do, take its toll of human life as though it were Christmas! I hope that we can agree that Regulator, Investigator, and Operator must be truly independent of each other to ensure Air Safety, or it cannot work. At the moment that is precisely the situation in UK Military Aviation. Until we can ensure that independence, avoidable accidents and needless fatalities will continue unnecessarily.
Air Power, the whole raison d'etre of military aviation, will suffer accordingly. One day the RAF will once again be pitted against a comparable opponent. Too late then to discover that there is something wrong with our bloody aircraft!
It all comes down to money in the end - you can underfund the CAA and wonder why it starts to struggle or you can cut costs in Mil aviation because doing it properly costs a lot - then you paper over the cracks with...errr paper, neverending reams of more complex requirements, none of which address the actual issue of airworthiness but simply make it look like so many people working hard must be making things safer.
Originally Posted by [email protected]
It all comes down to money in the end - you can underfund the CAA and wonder why it starts to struggle or you can cut costs in Mil aviation because doing it properly costs a lot - then you paper over the cracks with...errr paper, neverending reams of more complex requirements, none of which address the actual issue of airworthiness but simply make it look like so many people working hard must be making things safer.
Military Airworthiness budgets were plundered by RAF VSOs in order to pay for spectacularly incompetent AMSO policies and was fatally damaged by their malevolent excesses. The MAA thus inherited a busted flush and no amount of mission statements or Golden Periods could revive this forever pining Norwegian Blue.
The essential ring fencing of Air Safety budgets was breached year after year. Skilled and knowledgeable engineers were replaced by untrained and inexperienced apparatchiks who knew only to tick the required boxes to ensure that Safety Cases were broken, one after the other. The resulting canker infected fleet after fleet. Yes, it was about money but only because that Air Safety ring fencing was deliberately torn asunder by RAF VSOs.
The result is as you describe, a bureaucracy kept busy achieving little or nothing. The long term effect will be to reduce this nation's Air Power such that our ability to prevail in a future Air War will be hugely compromised. Even Fat Hermann never achieved that. The cover up must end and those responsible brought to book!
