John Purdey,
You are quite correct that there were many experienced SH operators in the chain of command.
At 1 Gp level there were Sqn Ldr Staff Officers for each aircraft type; there was also a Wg Cdr and a Gp Capt SH. The AOC himself had some 30+ years experience of helicopter operations.
These posts were replicated at HQ STC and, also, at MOD level. Let us not forget that the BOI was reviewed by CAS and his staff before its release.
The furore that erupted after release of the BOI owes much to a common misconception regarding the BOI system. Many believe that the panel assembled to investigate an accident is the ultimate authority on that accident. This simply is not true.
The authority for convening a BOI resides with the AOC in C who delegates that responsibility to the appropriate Group Commander; this Air Officer, in turn, nominates a President of the BOI and such other members as may be required by the circumstances of the "Accident". It is not unknown for a "President", or other Board members, to be replaced during an investigation if circumstances warrent such a move.
It is my belief that, due to the inordinate length of time that the BOI had taken (itself mainly due to the meticulous AAIB investigation), changes to the BOI were not an option. This despite the finding of the BOI that the cause of the accident was that the Pilots, whilst approaching high ground at a relatively high speed in poor weather, "selected an inappropriate rate of climb" to clear the Mull.
This is arrant nonsense. If you are approaching,at low level, high ground covered by poor weather in ANY type of aircraft the only appropriate rate of climb is the maximum attainable coupled with, if possible, a turn away from the obstacle. In a helicopter you have another option which is to slow down, stop, turn around and retrace your track. It is, of course, possible that the disparate altimeter sub-scale settings in the Chinook cockpit may have caused some confusion as to when it was safe to level out.
The laisser-faire attitude towards the regulations regarding the requirement to have breakfast before commencing flying operations, the maximum times between meals and permissable crew duty extensions (let alone the option of exceeding crew duty hours or nightstopping out of Theatre without approval):coupled with the disparate altimeter settings and navigation equipment tuned to a commercial radio station; do not, in my view, show a totally "professional" approach to the "job in hand".
Perhaps the proponants of the "FADEC runaway" theory could give us some idea of how many recorded occurrences there were before the accident and how many there have been since? It would also be useful to know how many of these occurrences resulted in accidents.