Recent Guardian Bit / Oxfordshire Coroner
I had a piece in the Graun comment pages last month. Wouldn't normally mention it, but at one point I said this, about the new special coroner for dead servicemen:
The coroner and the high court are straying onto dangerous ground ... They are frequently right in the conclusions they draw about equipment - as in the case of Captain James Phillippson, for instance. But sometimes they're at least partly wrong. Sometimes the jurists really are interfering in technical matters which they don't know enough about. Let them investigate, but be wary of making conclusions.
And now, the special coroner says that Nimrod MR2 was "never airworthy", and that as a result the whole fleet should be grounded. However, he wouldn't have recommended grounding if the MR2 wasn't so near the end of its life. Even though it has never been airworthy!
Nope, doesn't make sense. I mean, ground the MR2s by all means - the RAF are only working them so hard in the Stan so as to push the case for MRA4 and continued existence of the Kinloss community. There are loads of other platforms which could do the mission much more cheaply - the money you'd save binning MRA4 and Kinloss would buy you anything you like, and leave loads over.
But saying that a plane "was never airworthy" after it's been in service for decades without snags is fairly silly, and then saying you'd let it keep flying in a non-airworthy state if it had more use ahead is very silly.
Fact is, Nimrod is very old and maintenance wasn't good enough. Sure, the design could have been better to begin with - but it wasn't beyond the wit of man to maintain or if necessary modify the MR2 so that it could tank safely. Rather than blaming long-dead designers, it would have been more appropriate here to name some guilty men, probably still in the RAF engineering hierarchy right now, who should either have done a better job or refused to sign off the cabs as good to go. If that meant the Nimrod MR2 fleet sitting idle for the next few years, and one's bosses not being able to say "look at Afghanistan" when people asked just why exactly we need new Nimrod MRA4s at £300 million a pop - well, sometimes being a good engineer calls for some moral courage.
As it is, the coroner has pretty much let everyone off the hook, and made sure that future judicial rulings - and even evidence given at inquests - will be that much easier for the MoD to ignore.
He really should have been a bit wary of drawing this conclusion.
I had a piece in the Graun comment pages last month. Wouldn't normally mention it, but at one point I said this, about the new special coroner for dead servicemen:
The coroner and the high court are straying onto dangerous ground ... They are frequently right in the conclusions they draw about equipment - as in the case of Captain James Phillippson, for instance. But sometimes they're at least partly wrong. Sometimes the jurists really are interfering in technical matters which they don't know enough about. Let them investigate, but be wary of making conclusions.
And now, the special coroner says that Nimrod MR2 was "never airworthy", and that as a result the whole fleet should be grounded. However, he wouldn't have recommended grounding if the MR2 wasn't so near the end of its life. Even though it has never been airworthy!
Nope, doesn't make sense. I mean, ground the MR2s by all means - the RAF are only working them so hard in the Stan so as to push the case for MRA4 and continued existence of the Kinloss community. There are loads of other platforms which could do the mission much more cheaply - the money you'd save binning MRA4 and Kinloss would buy you anything you like, and leave loads over.
But saying that a plane "was never airworthy" after it's been in service for decades without snags is fairly silly, and then saying you'd let it keep flying in a non-airworthy state if it had more use ahead is very silly.
Fact is, Nimrod is very old and maintenance wasn't good enough. Sure, the design could have been better to begin with - but it wasn't beyond the wit of man to maintain or if necessary modify the MR2 so that it could tank safely. Rather than blaming long-dead designers, it would have been more appropriate here to name some guilty men, probably still in the RAF engineering hierarchy right now, who should either have done a better job or refused to sign off the cabs as good to go. If that meant the Nimrod MR2 fleet sitting idle for the next few years, and one's bosses not being able to say "look at Afghanistan" when people asked just why exactly we need new Nimrod MRA4s at £300 million a pop - well, sometimes being a good engineer calls for some moral courage.
As it is, the coroner has pretty much let everyone off the hook, and made sure that future judicial rulings - and even evidence given at inquests - will be that much easier for the MoD to ignore.
He really should have been a bit wary of drawing this conclusion.
posted by Lew Page at 9:26 PM
