Primarily for general aviation discussion, but other aviation topics are also welcome.
#1670935
Dave

To clarify, it was the airworthiness isue that I found scandalous. Specifying the wrong (sub-)standard of aircraft and then forcing it into service against the unanimous advice of the experts at Boscombe. ... and then it was a major factor in the accident at Mull.

For that, senior officers should have gone to prison, and still should.
cockney steve liked this
#1670947
Kemble Pitts wrote:Dave

To clarify, it was the airworthiness isue that I found scandalous. Specifying the wrong (sub-)standard of aircraft and then forcing it into service against the unanimous advice of the experts at Boscombe. ... and then it was a major factor in the accident at Mull.

For that, senior officers should have gone to prison, and still should.


We can have differing view here. To say that the airworthiness was a major factor is not too different to saying the pilots were grossly negligent - where is the evidence? Thinking about this another way, if the task was undertaken by a HC1 instead of an HC2, would the accident still have happened? Of course, nobody knows.

One final point - the manner in which the aircraft was put into service was wrong and, dare I say, grossly negligent. That is a view that should be held regardless of whether there was a crash or not; the crash was the mechanism that opened Pandoora’s Box.
AlanC, gaznav, Ben K liked this
#1671042
I think the issue here was as simple as no one could say for sure what caused the crash beyond any reasonable doubt.
Therefore no finding of gross negligence could be made against the dead airmen.
I seem to remember even the initial board agreed with this, but it was then processed by those further up the chain of command and an eventual finding of gross negligence was made. Subsequent review showed this to be unsustainable, and it is no longer possible for senior staff to find pilots guilty of gross negligence.

That this took until 2011 to overturn, some 17 years after the crash just shows how slow the establishment can be when it chooses, with a series of politicians supporting the status quo and hoping inconvenient things would go away, if stalled for long enough

I suspect similar things happen throughout government and public sector organisations constantly as face saving becomes more important than the truth

None of the above contradicts
Dave Ps own thoughts, I’m simply making the point that any doubt should have resulted in a different initial finding, and taking until 2011 to overturn a patently unsafe decision says much about bureaucracy’s abilities to be willfuly blind.
#1671048
The armed forces as a whole are struggling with what is and isn’t an acceptable risk these days. Money (thus training time) is very tight, and the limits of training/recency are being discovered the hard way. The US military are discovering the same thing - incident rates are higher pretty much across the board. The services are to some extent a prisoner of their attitude and ethos in that they will always try to get the task done with what’s available.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to assign responsibility away from the sharp end, and despite the offence of corporate manslaughter created after the Herald of Free Enterprise our legal system still focuses on those left holding the parcel when the music stops. A good example of this tendency in the civilian world (without getting into matters sub judice) is that Andy Hill is the only person facing any charges after the Shoreham accident despite all the evidence of systemic flaws. The military system also creates perverse incentives, with individuals in key posts for 2-3 years, with career prospects based on their performance in delivering capability. From what friends intimately involved day, things haven’t changed as much as they should post Haddon-Cave.
gaznav, AlanC liked this