The Nimrod Review - Official Documents

The Nimrod Review
13.4
13.5
13.6
13.7
‘CHANGE’
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financial, legislative, or merely those symptomatic of keeping an old ac flying. The pressures that
ensue from reducing resources place additional burdens on a ‘can do’ organisation such as the
Nimrod Force and call for highly attentive management, closely attuned to the incipient threat to
safe standards, if airworthiness is to be safeguarded.” (emphasis added)
These concerns and warnings in the NART report were dismissed at the time as ‘uninformed, crew-room
level, emotive comment lacking substantive evidence and focus’. 4 They should not have been dismissed so
easily in 1998. They proved to be very prescient. (It should be noted that many of the same concerns were
echoed to me by rank-and-file during my visits to RAF Kinloss ten years later in 2008.)
In my view, the NART concerns and warnings were not sufficiently heeded in the following years leading up
to the XV230 accident, 1998 to 2006:
13.5.1 Management was not “highly attentive” to safeguarding the airworthiness of the Nimrod fleet in
all respects in the period 1998 to 2006, as we have seen from the Nimrod Safety Case (Chapters
10 and 11), the lack of leak trend monitoring (Chapter 5) and the lack of historical duct failure
analysis (Chapter 7).
13.5.2 Management was not “closely attuned” to the incipient threat to safe standards within the
Nimrod fleet. On the contrary, the conflict identified “between ever-reducing resources and ...
increasing demands” became markedly worse in the period 1998 to 2006: overall resources
continued to be reduced and “operational, financial, legislative” pressures substantially increased
as a result of: (i) severe financial targets following the Strategic Defence Review and the setting
of the ‘Strategic Goal’; (ii) massive organisational change particularly in the Defence Logistics
Organisation; (iii) markedly increased operational demands due to Iraq and Afghanistan; and (iv)
the fact that 30-year old Nimrod MR2s were required to be kept flying longer than planned due
to delays in the MRA4 programme.
13.5.3 Meanwhile, the overall integrity of the airworthiness regime and culture within the MOD
weakened during this period as a result of organisational change and the ‘strategic’ emphasis
given to delivering ‘change’ and savings targets. Safety and airworthiness slipped off the top of
the agenda.
The Nimrod fleet of aircraft was going to require more (not less) care, resources and vigilance and a
strengthening (not weakening) of the airworthiness regime and culture if these ‘legacy’ aircraft were going
to continue to operate safely until their extended Out-of-Service date.
Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case because of the ‘cuts, change, dilution and distraction’ that took
place in the MOD between 1998 and 2006.
Organisational change and trauma (1998-2006)
“There was so much successive change-upon-change and not enough support to people
like the IPTLs in understanding exactly what the environment looked like, what their
responsibilities were and what help they needed to undertake those responsibilities.” (RAF
Officer, 2008).
The 1998 Strategic Defence Review
13.8
The starting point of any analysis of the effect of organisational change in the past decade is the Strategic
Defence Review (SDR) of 1998. 5 No single event introduced as deep or broad a change in defence acquisition
as the SDR. It started a process of continuous ‘change’ which lasted for years, and the benefits and disbenefits
of which continue to be felt today.
4 Notes of a meeting to discuss the report dated 24 September 1998. See also the Brief for ADI dated October 1998 D/DAO/14/3/5 which refers to:
“regret that some of the content [of the NART report] does tend to reflect crewroom gossip/whinges rather than factual data”.
5 Modern Forces for a Modern World, Strategic Defence Review, 1998 White Paper (Cm 3999).