I must confess a degree of sympathy for CAS, and for any serving officer who has to appear before that committee of (for the most part) fools. Especially John Spellar, who as a Minister routinely lied to the same committee on the Mull of Kintyre case, prolonging the families’ agony for some years. (e.g. ‘FADEC software is not safety critical’).
And while evasive and unsure of his facts, I don’t think CAS lied outright or dropped his men in it, which was the routine response of a certain predecessor on the same Chinook case. Wigston took the hit, which is his job, when it is clear that most of the RAF’s problems have been building for decades. Had he chosen to, he could have pointed to the fact that at least 3 of the committee members, and many of their predecessors, had been advised of these problems some years ago and done SFA. Not least the Chairman, when a junior Defence Minister from 2017-19.
It was a sh*t show, but there’s far more to it than one man’s poor performance.