So… 5 years ago the government scrapped 9 brand new British built Nimrod aircraft leaving the UK with no maritime patrol capability and today they announce that we are buying 9 Boeing P8s from the USA because we have no maritime patrol capability.

Confused.

not sure why you’re confused. makes perfect sense. 😕 🙄

when you say “brand new”……..?

That project was only £800m over budget and not getting much better

Welcome to the ceraaaaaaaazy world of MOD procurement. Where the revolving door from the senior ranks of the forces into arms firms ensures a world of nonsensical, self-serving decisions and waste on an absolutely biblical scale

Cuts? It’s already been announced that “defence” spending is to increase.

Stealth edit is stealthy (and more expensive than a regular edit).

😆

We should be spending much more on defence, education and the NHS but people won’t vote for that.

but dew to edukashun and helf sirvis kuts there will onli b a bunch of stoopid sic peeple to sayve… coff, sneez

scrapped 9 brand new British built Nimrod aircraft

because they could never be made airworthy or safe.

Can’t remember who he was but some government bod or other on radio 4 this morning but the comment was how it’s ok as they are saving the money by cutting welfare.
That’s alright then!

unemployed go to army, problem solved?

Yup, axing Nimrods was the best idea. I want the Donkeys that put that forward and managed out the procurement and instigated to be held to account, but that will never happen.

Don’t care where the next phase of capability comes from, just so long as its a proven technology and will be delivered on time, well I say on time but really mean within a year later than plan.

Chuffin idiots, all down the supply/delivery chain in the MOD.

Chuffin rich idiots you mean 😉

Trying to work out exactly how maritime patrol aircraft will defeat ISIS.

From Wikipedia: The MRA4 was ultimately cancelled in 2010 as a result of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, at which point it was £789 million over-budget and over nine years late

I read somewhere ages ago that a lot of the problem was that nearly all the Nimrods were pretty much bespoke handbuilt aircraft which made fitting a mass produced upgrade near enough impossible.

Chuffin idiots, all down the supply/delivery chain in the MOD.

Not just the MOD…

With Scotland’s investment of £180 million in a computer delivery system – costing nearly £10,000 per BPS application – clearly failing,

http://www.nfus.org.uk/news/2015/november/payment-scheme-let-down-scottish-farmers

Also interesting to note that over half of Scottish farming income comes from subsidies.

Nimrod aircraft scrapped at Stockport BAE factory

For an island dependent on our maritime links not lining up a replacement for Nimrod until now was crass stupidity, its like having the money to buy aircraft carriers but not to put aircraft on them, the support ships to protect and support it or even people to staff them, who would be that stupid?

Lets us not forget where the Nimrod came from; it was a sixties aircraft based on a modified version of the Comet, which dated back to the fourties. It certainly left a capability gap, but it should have been replaced decades ago.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Defence/article527716.ece

Liam Fox, the defence secretary, has been accused of leaving a “massive gap” in the nation’s security by scrapping the fleet of maritime patrol planes.

But classified documents seen by The Sunday Times reveal Ministry of Defence (MoD) safety tests conducted last year on the first Nimrod MRA4, built by BAE Systems, found “several hundred design non-compliances”.

Among them were problems opening and closing the bomb bay doors, failures of the landing gear to deploy, overheating engines and gaps in the engine walls, limitations operating in icy conditions, and concerns that “a single bird-strike” could disable the aircraft’s controls.

However, the most serious problem discovered by Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) inspectors at MoD Abbey Wood in Bristol involved a still unresolved design flaw. It concerns the proximity of a hot air pipe to an uninsulated fuel line, widely blamed for an explosion on board Nimrod XV230 on September 2, 2006, near Kandahar airport in Afghanistan.

A three-page summary of the faults, labelled “restricted” and written on September 17, last year, stated: “The work being undertaken by the MoD to validate the BAE Systems aircraft’s safety case during the week of September 13, 2010, identified a potentially serious design defect: a small section of a hot air pipe was discovered to be uninsulated in an area that also contains fuel pipes, which is outside the design regulations.”

It added: “Parallels could be drawn between this design defect and that which is thought to have caused the loss of the Nimrod MR2 (XV230) in Afghanistan in September 2006 resulting in the death of 14 personnel.”

The revelations support Fox’s claim that the aircraft simply was not airworthy.

The Nimrod is designed as a maritime aircraft capable of roles including submarine detection and warfare, and long-range sea rescue.

But the DE&S report found the ability of the new MRA4 aircraft to drop sonar buoys, depth charges or life rafts would be seriously hampered: “The aircraft will enter service with a restriction preventing the opening of the bomb bay doors and a longer term solution has yet to be found.

“A single bird-strike has a potential to cause it critical damage, which could disable primary aileron flight control to both wings.”

The first few flights of the first Nimrod saw it failing to deploy its nose landing gear “due to incorrect tolerance design”. Inspectors also found the Nimrod had “severe limitations for operating in icing [sic] conditions”, without going into detail, and said there were unresolved problems with “wing fatigue”.

The report also highlighted overheating in the engine bay, and gaps in the engine bay firewalls that BAE Systems had claimed did not exist: “BAES had previously produced a report that incorrectly stated these had been inspected and met design and build standards.”

The MoD report concluded: “MRA4 carries in total several hundred design non-compliances. While many of these relate to legacy design and necessary design constraints, a significant number (including some of the issues listed above) are not what we would expect to find in a well-designed aircraft.”

TL;DR – 9 years late, over budget, they didn’t work very well and could go BANG when refuelled.

I’ve been told that the Defence spending had to increase to 2% of GDP to meet NATO membership criteria..

scrapped 9 brand new British built Nimrod

You do realise the fuselage were old Comets? Due to the way they had been built in the 1950’s, not one of them were exactly the same.

The madness was not scrapping them to start with and starting with new, modern aircraft.

Cheaper to hand out ‘Rubber Dingeys’ to ‘British First’ and let them loose on those dastardly invaders

How many NATO countries are spending 2% of GDP? (I’ll give you a clue – not many)

Similar issue to SA80s. We spent so much on them to keep jobs in the industry that we could simply have paid off all the worked a huge sum of money not to do anything, bought American M16s (which are a better weapon) and been no worse off.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0p90GMVfniIC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=sa80+m16+lions+donkeys&source=bl&ots=y8c_evO73E&sig=OnNWdsYPElLK80YupagM3jDiMUo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwif1p740qbJAhWH6w4KHS5oANEQ6AEIIDAA#v=onepage&q=sa80%20m16%20lions%20donkeys&f=false

Not the worst decision we’ve ever made.

Building a “state of the art” aircraft carrier that doesn’t have a catapult must be up there…

Not the worst decision we’ve ever made.

The British built Apaches must be up there as well.

Purchased in Kit form from the USA, they were assembled in a factory in/near Yeovil.
Rumour has it that it would have been cheaper to buy complete ‘copters from the USA, then close the UK factory on day 1 giving everyone who worked there £300k redundancy..

I work in the Defence industry – we design/build stuff to go in UK Navy Ships and submarines.

The level of waste/poor decision making is still shocking.
A Senior guy who works at HMS Sultan summed it up pretty well to me earlier this year –
If the Navy wanted to buy a dog, they’d buy a cat + a mod kit…

Don’t buy this if you suffer from high blood pressure or a lack of a sense of humour or perspective

very funny, sad and depressing all at the same time

b r, that article smelled of hatchet job so I had a wee look. The cost of the computer system is £60.4m not £180m, the £180m is for the entire CAP change project not just the computer system as they claim.

The CAP payment deadline is June 2016- it looks like the planned December payment date is slipping to January for many payments but that means making most payments 5 months early instead of 6. (it seems that the BPS payments in England are working to pretty much the same deadlines; the Welsh don’t seem to know yet)

There’s an obvious procurement issue in that the original business case was written then regulatory requirements for the project changed; the Scottish Government naturally are blaming the EU for that but I don’t know if that’s true, it could be they jumped the gun and launched before the regulation was decided. Or it could be that the short timescales made that a good option. Wait and see, as ever there’ll be a postmortem once the dust settles and the payments are done.

Incidentally, Scottish farming gets a little over half the UK average CAP funding- 128 euros per hectare compared to the UK average of 225 euros and eu average of 260. Those subsidy-grabbing Scots eh 😉

Far better to buy defence equipment where someone else has taken all the losses of developing it and actually getting it to work.
I spent 7 years in the MOD as a photographer. On one occasion we were tasked with recording the spin of a portable missile fired from a launcher. This was a UK developed system designed to be used against enemy helicopters. To test which markings and frame rates would work best we knocked up our own cardboard missile and launcher which was powered by one of us running and jumping on a see-saw type launcher. Films processed and decisions made the trial then went ahead with the million pound missile which sadly when fired proved to have a range of approximately one half of our cardboard missile. 🙂

^^^While this is obviously a good idea, it isn’t as easy as it sounds –
We could buy quite a lot of different things from our Parent company in the USA, which has passed first article testing for use on US Naval Platforms.
However our MOD invariably have different acceptance standards to the USA, so the whole lot would need re-testing/qualifying.

Shock grades are a good example, and shock testing is very expensive.

What’s the fact the Nimrods were based on a 50’s aircraft got to do with anyting? Much of the US’s front line fighters are 50’s/60’s designs (F15’s, F16’s) and they’re still operating Boeing 707 based aircraft (same era as the Comet/Nimrod), not to meniton the B52 and U2’s.

Similar issue to SA80s. We spent so much on them to keep jobs in the industry that we could simply have paid off all the worked a huge sum of money not to do anything, bought American M16s (which are a better weapon) and been no worse off.

And then they had to spend even more giving the weapon to K&H to make it reliable/usable!
To be fair to them, the L85A2 is now a very reliable and accurate weapon which isn’t the same length as a broom! Still has too many working parts though making it a right **** to clean.

However our MOD invariably have different acceptance standards to the USA, so the whole lot would need re-testing/qualifying.

If only we had some form of organisation that our allied military nations were part of, that could set standards for interoperability and assign classification numbers to equipment that had been approved to this common standard?

What’s the fact the Nimrods were based on a 50’s aircraft got to do with anything

Because they were 50’s BRITISH built aircraft – so if you wanted to replace anything as part of the upgrade, like wings, then you couldn’t just make nine new ones, you had to make nine completley different ones to fit what had been coach built at the time.

b r, that article smelled of hatchet job so I had a wee look. The cost of the computer system is £60.4m not £180m, the £180m is for the entire CAP change project not just the computer system as they claim.

Link?

The CAP payment deadline is June 2016- it looks like the planned December payment date is slipping to January for many payments but that means making most payments 5 months early instead of 6. (it seems that the BPS payments in England are working to pretty much the same deadlines; the Welsh don’t seem to know yet)

Previous years’ have always paid in December, which is why there’s a bit of an uproar.

Incidentally, Scottish farming gets a little over half the UK average CAP funding- 128 euros per hectare compared to the UK average of 225 euros and eu average of 260. Those subsidy-grabbing Scots eh

Yep, but still over half their ‘income’ is through subsidy. No doubt the lower values is due to the greater percentage of ‘poor’ quality land.

Found it, or at least an audit report from March 2014.

Ok, will agree that my numbers (and the article) are out, but probably not by much based upon the steady increases seen to date:

8. The original business case estimated the cost of the programme at £88 million at December 2012. The programme team undertook a major review of the business case in March 2014, reflecting additional information on costs and benefits, and further clarity on the detail of the EC regulations. This most recent update included an increase in the estimated programme cost to £111 million, an increase of £23 million (26 per cent).
9. The largest area of increase between the original business case and the revision is the cost of the IT delivery partner. Originally estimated at £24 million, the cost in the revised business case is estimated at £46 million (excluding VAT), an increase of 92 per cent. The revised business case estimates the full costs of the programme when VAT and inflation are included at £127.8 million. It is expected that the business case will be subject to further review in the coming months.
10. The programme had spent £44.9 million to the end of July 2014. This included £26.8 million in 2013/14, and £15.7 million in the first four months of 2014/15. The most recent budget forecasts show that the whole programme is currently estimated to cost £137.3 million (exhibit 1), a further increase of £9.5 million (7.4 per cent) over the revised business case budget. The Scottish Government manages the aggregate costs of the programme within its overall budget, which will have to accommodate all costs in excess of the original forecast.

http://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/docs/central/2014/s22_141002_cap_futures.pdf

b r – Member

Link?

Ironically, I found the link directly from an NFU article trying to pass off the £180m as the true cost 😆 They quoted this page as supporting the claim, I went and had a look. It’s just one of those things where someone’s bullshit has become the accepted truth because it’s repeated so often and because so many articles are just cut-n-pastes.

http://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/docs/central/2014/s22_141002_cap_futures.pdf

What’s the fact the Nimrods were based on a 50’s aircraft got to do with anyting?

Well the fact that they fell to bits in the air and pretty much handed the future of commercial airline construction to the USA is worth bearing in mind.

ninfan – Member

However our MOD invariably have different acceptance standards to the USA, so the whole lot would need re-testing/qualifying.

If only we had some form of organisation that our allied military nations were part of, that could set standards for interoperability and assign classification numbers to equipment that had been approved to this common standard?

If only there weren’t so many different standards which allowed people to pick/choose which they wanted to use for each job!

The idea that everything used by NATO was in anyway common is a joke, there are multiple standards used on each project sometimes..
The problems stem from the design stage – where far too many things are designed from the ground up with no thoughts about compatibility, etc.

And as for NSNs (which I think you are getting at) you would believe the duplication/mistakes in that database…