You really don't have a damned clue what happens outside your ego and backyard, do you CAP? You define "Health and Safety" as being "nannyism" and "removing the responsibility of the individual".
Here's a little bit of clue for you. "Health and Safety" doesn't make it anyone else's fault if I step in front of a train doing 125mph on an open line. What "Health and Safety" does is puts a lookout up the track to warn me that a train is coming while I am concentrating on my work task. If I ignore the warning and don't move to a position of safety, that's not the lookout's fault or the procedures' fault, it's mine. It's got nothing to do with removing responsibility from the individual and everything to do with trying to prevent accidents we already know about how to avoid, because someone decides it would be cheaper and/or quicker to run the risk of it happening (almost always to someone other than themselves). The fact that legislation is sometimes misused and abused by lawyers trying to shift blame onto someone else is very definitely true, I agree entirely, which brings me nicely onto your next error.
Your next incorrect statement is about BAW having to ground Concorde because the type certificate was rescinded. Were you paying attention to events, you would be aware that British Airways was operating at a very large loss at the time, wanted to shut down Concorde operations but knew that it would be a PR disaster to do so. Virgin Atlantic had already offered money for all British Airways' Concorde fleet and had put forward a plan that would, in theory, operate them at a profit. British Airways were instrumental in getting the type certificate revoked, to prevent them being painted red and flying again in any form, because it would be proof that the fleet's mounting losses were due to BA's management and not the aircraft themselves. Again, it had nothing to do with an engineering decision, it was purely to do with politics and money. This is why the Concorde fleet engineers up to a very high level of management are still campaigning to get one returned to the air for display purposes and offering their services to get it there. Do you know any Concorde engineers? I've spent quite a lot of time talking to one and reading what others have written and said.
In the case of these three aircraft, nothing at all has been lost by their grounding. Again, you fail to understand that when you don't work for the US military, apparently the world's largest employer (
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17429786) then budgets for militaries ARE tight and that limiting flying hours is often done to balance the books, therefore the savings in fuel and maintanance, as well as flight pay for the crews, which some EU countries still pay, and other costs can be significant. That's a political rather than engineering decision again, but it'll be more fuel to the argument in favour of not flying aircraft until the cause of the accident is known. I don't, for the record, know whether the RNAF pay extra on days when aircraft fly so that particular component may not be an issue.
Knowing and working with a lot of people who live around the world, I get to see and hear a lot of different methods of operation. The Japanese and Scandanavians are very risk averse and it means that their planning and response to an emergency is different from that of the UK, US or similar countries. Not "wrong", not "right", just different, as has already been said. There are plusses and minuses to it wherever on the scale any particular people are and that people's actions, again anywhere on that scale, can result in apparently unnecessary results up to and including death. Doing nothing and over-reacting can both have catastrophic consequences. There is still a massive difference between saying "that's not how I'd do it" and saying "what they are doing is wrong". I'm promoting the former, what I'm seeing here, from both of you, is the latter.
Ian P.
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