How can you be so unreasonable, BEags? It's just 'flawed'.....

Anyone got any further light to shed?

Don't you mean floored?. What a shambles.

Agreed a real shambles. One would have thought that the Project Directors and Managers would have made certain that the software documentation and code was to be analysed in accordance with UK Defence Standards after the lessons learnt with FADEC. No doubt they have now all retired and are sitting back enjoying their protected pensions.
Jackonicko, you asked if anyone has any further light to shed. One thought that does come to mind is they could become expensive garden sheds with a built in greenhouse, sorry "glass cockpit." Will we ever see any Smart Acquisition?

No surprises then we wanted a comprimise aircraft because our civil service masters wanted to save money and we got an aircraft that doesn't work that we can't even resell.

The whole issue of the Mk3 being brought into service has been muddied by the comprehensive upgrade programme that has been embodied on the Mk2/2a. Around 20 UOR modifications have been embodied to most of the MK2/2a fleet giving a capability that is now well beyond that of the Mk3 in it's current form.

It is staggering that the Mk3 has taken so long to get released into service that we have been able to retrospectively design a modification to the existing fleet, embody, test, train and ultimately use in anger.

Many of the Mk3's have components that are compatible with the Mk2/2a and guess what, they have been robbed blind to service the Mk2 fleet.

Procurement 1 Fleet 0

Decision to be made soon - probably prior to summer recess.

FAST FORWARD TO MAR 2005
 

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Article on today's news - the worst defence procurement ever. The 8 HC3s which cost £259m are up for sale, but given the fact that BritMil couldn't make them viable, the chances are no other nation will want to touch them, so they may well be scrapped. Didn't do Hoon, et al, any harm though.

Not sure it would be Mr Hon who takes the blame. The blame has to rest with the IPTL. He is the guy who should hang his head in shame and resign.

Does make a mockery of those that propose buying kit off the shelf from the US will solve all of our problems. An expensive way of learning a lesson. No excuses can be offered Def Stan 00-55 (software safety) was initially issued in 91.

Au contraire, monsieur Retard, surely. According to the posts above it seems that the main cause of the cock up was NOT buying it off the shelf and insisting on some 'cost-cutting' b@$tardisation. Gross negligence indeed, BEagle. Oh when will we learn...

On the plus side, good to see that we have been much more demanding about the Mk3 Release to Service than arguably with the Mk2, eh Mr.Dixon?

Radio 4 this morning was saying that 'the aircraft couldn't fly in cloud because the altimeter didn't work'

Please tell me thats a vast over-simplification.

FJ2ME

I'm afraid I have to au contraire your au contraire

American safety standards are often an order of magnitude lower than ours, that is one of the reasons that why we cannot buy straight off the shelf (other than domestic industry interests). If you buy their kit and assess it against our safety critical standards it will often fail.

We have to build in additional redundancy and safety measures to integrate their weapons becasue they will accept a higher level of loss due to self-damage. Brimstone is a public example, there are others instances less public.

You cannot test software to death in the same way as you do hardware and so it is judged in a qualitative manner (documentation, assembly tools and other geeky bits). Hence, a MAR fail is almost a given because they do not use our methodology. A lot of effort has been put in to reading across US software standards (CMM I believe) to ours, AFAIK there is still no authoritative guidance on direct read across.

This reduces their procurement costs, but I assume that they can take afford to lose more kit than we can.

I have to agree with you FJ2ME. The only consolation in this fiasco is that the MoD was reluctant to issue a Release to Service until it was fit to fly. I wonder if anyone will be found grossly negligent with regards procurement?

If only they had been this reluctant with the Mk2...........

Brian

"Justice has no expiry date" - John Cook

TotalWar,

If Buff has responsibility for the department, then it is his head that should roll, as per recent precedents e.g. immigration, transport.

What's the betting? :rolleyes:

It's a bit of both - the idea, v popular at the time, was to go COTS as much as possible. Chinook IPT did - a load of 'Dutch' COTS that Boeing were putting together was picked for the Mk3, although overall the project was to meet UK requirements. That's requirements as in wish list as opposed to Requirements - part of the development cycle. Inherent in COTS is the difficulty in getting safety evidence for it.

Interestingly though, these issues were raised with the IPT when a supportability study was carried out in 1998. The effects on safety parallel this, but were not the object of the exercise. It was pointed out that because of the COTS nature of the magical glass cockpit, the software therein would not be able to be modified, and thus was limited in its use. The IPT were not very happy with the report!

Boll@x! Different maybe, but that doesn't mean lower.

Jungly AEO

I have had to provide MAR recommendations for US weapons and safety critical systems fitted to our cabs, have you?

Safety cases are derived as a mathematical probability of an event occuring, this means numbers. If the numbers thay have to reach to be declared safe are different, one has to be higher than the other. Unfortunately, there are a lot of numbers to look at, the basic EF weapons safety case was 1500 pages of numbers.

Suggest you read Def Stan 00-56 and Mil Std 882. I suggest you look at ES(Air) BP 1201 that will give you the targets for your own aircraft.

Our processes for hardware assessment are similar to the US, the targets we have to reach are different. US processes for assessing software quality are different and as I mentioned earlier there is no read-across for safety critical systems. Hence had the Chinook been bought off the shelf it still would not have gained MAR, nor would Apache if bought direct off the US.

We add complexity by the addition or modification of systems to make them meet our standards, or we reduce the operating envelope.

retard - "Suggest you read Def Stan 00-56 and Mil Std 882. We set higher numerical targets than the US."

Actually, suggest you read 00-56, it doesn't set a target.

The target for UK Miltary Aircraft is laid down in JSP 553.

sw

Safeware

I stand corrected, I was getting carried away doing this and putting sprog to bed, 00-56 and BP 1201 are the methods of assessment. I have also read these documents more times than I care to remember. Although in my day the target was in JSP 318B Vol 4, 553 I believe is recent.

Jungly AEO

In my posting I was referring to aircraft self damage. This is an area where we do diverge and this causes significant integration problems and costs.

Regards

Retard

Typical! Suddenly we have engineers coming out of the woodwork with excuses for this fiasco. There are no excuses - the a/c are a waste of tax-payers cash pure and simple. If we had not f***ed about with a fancy spec those machines would be doing a decent job of work for UK forces NOW. This must never happen again - no doubt those involved at various levels have received gongs and promotions. They should be 'outed' on this website. (Would be nice for Buff to take a little heat on the way............)

Goat

I have not offered any excuses, just stated the rules that we have to work to. Engineers do not create the rules anymore than you create air traffic regulations.

The fancy rules are mandated by ADRP, MOD and QinetiQ have no flex with regard to intepretation of safety regulations when applied to critical systems.

You need a lot more clout than I ever had to change safety standards whilst in uniform, and now I am in industry these standards are contractually binding. If you want to buy kit off the shelf, MOD need to change the standards. Our standards are possibly the most stringent, and I have worked on other nations latest generation aircraft that have not been allowed to carry out trials in our airspace because they cannot meet our standards. If you cannot change the rules at least carry out procurement with your eyes open.