John Purdey
Thank you for your response.
I think I know how you'll respond to this, but my answer has to be "No, I'd carry on trying to have the negligence verdict overturned - the decision to find the pilots negligent was unfounded, even 'beyond reasonable doubt', let alone 'beyond any doubt whatsoever'."
However, as several erudite legal minds have already applied their expertise to this case and found there to be no grounds for a finding of negligence, including what amounts to the highest appeal court in the Land (the House of Lords Select Committee), I doubt that an extension to this campaign would be necessary, provided the chosen judge did not have a vested interest (eg went to the same school as one of the Air Marshals or belongs to the same 'secret society' as, say, Geoff Hoon). This may sound paranoid, but I understand that Sir William Wratten resigned from the Royal Aeronautical Society because he felt that, as a member, he was not being backed up sufficiently by the RAeS. He seems to have been unable to accept the fact that the RAeS may have considered that his decision was a poor one and therefore not worth supporting.
I would have thought that Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle would be the right sort of person to examine all the evidence. He was Lord of Appeal in Ordinary from 1988-96 and would apply his intellect to the case but, as you know, he has already done that and pronounced that there are no grounds for a negligence finding. We could therefore save time and simply apply the ruling of the Select Commitee, which many of us, naively it turns out, believed would happen as a matter of course. No doubt AM Day or Wratten, Mr Blair or Mr Hoon would object to Lord Jauncey's selection and would insist on someone that subsequently turned out to be from the same former university debating society, same golf club or the same freemasonry lodge as one of the aforementioned. This is the only kind of circumstance in which I can imagine any objective legal mind might come up with any conclusion other than that a finding of negligence against the pilots is unwarranted.
It is possible that the pilots were negligent - I cannot deny that - but I and the House of Lords' Select Committee share the opinion that there is insufficient evidence (indeed almost none at all) to find them negligent 'beyond any doubt whatsoever'. I, like Air Cdre Blakely (see post above) can only assume that there is some sort of hidden agenda for not having already set aside the negligence findings.
John, I would ask you to read my previous post again and ask yourself whether you could honestly say that, without any doubt whatsoever, the pilots of ZD576 were definitely negligent or whether there might be an alternative explanation, beyond the control of the two pilots, for this tragic accident.