From today's Daily Telegraph
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Lords inquiry clears Chinook crash pilots. .By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent and David Millward. .(Filed: 06/02/2002)
. .TWO pilots found guilty of "gross negligence" by the Ministry of Defence after the 1994 Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter crash were cleared yesterday by a specially constituted House of Lords committee.
The Mk 2 helicopter was carrying 25 senior intelligence and security officers from Northern Ireland to a conference at Fort Campbell in north-east Scotland. Twenty-nine people died.
An RAF board of inquiry, an air accident investigation board inquiry and a Scottish fatal accident inquiry all ruled that they could not determine what had led to the crash.
But two RAF air marshals, reviewing the RAF board of inquiry, rejected its failure to accord blame and amended it to find the captain, Flt-Lt Jonathan Tapper and his co-pilot Flt-Lt Richard Cook, experienced members of the RAF's special forces flight, guilty of "negligence in the gross degree".
The House of Lords committee, chaired by a retired law lord, Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, and including two QCs, Lord Brennan and Lord Hooson, dismissed the air marshals' conclusions.
Air Chief Marshal Sir John Day, C-in-C Strike Command, who was then Air Officer Commanding No 1 Group, which is responsible for helicopter operations, was the first of the air marshals to review the board of inquiry.
As such it was he who initiated the allegation of "gross negligence". He was supported in that judgment by Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten, the then C-in-C Strike Command.
The committee said Sir John's conclusions "must be weakened by his reliance on matters which he treated as facts but which have been demonstrated to our satisfaction to be not facts but merely hypotheses or assumptions".
It pointed out that the RAF's rules on boards of inquiry at the time stated that only in cases in which there was "absolutely no doubt whatsoever" should deceased air crew be found negligent.
It concluded unanimously that the air marshals were "not justified in finding that negligence on the part of the pilots caused the aircraft to crash".
The crash has been shrouded in controversy, in part because of the nature of the passengers but more recently after the "gross negligence" verdict and problems with the Chinook Mk 2, in particular its FADEC computerised fuel control system.
The Lords committee heard that the Mk 2 had been introduced into operational service in November 1993 despite the fact that the MoD's aeroplane and armament experimental establishment at Boscombe Down refused to recommend its release because of the FADEC problems.
An independent contractor called in to review the FADEC software had stopped after finding 486 anomalies. The MoD in its evidence admitted that there had been five occasions when the equipment had malfunctioned during flight in the run-up to the crash.
Allegations that some pilots had refused to fly the Mk2 were "an over simplification", the MoD told the committee. But witness A, a member of the same special forces flight as the pilots, described problems he and his colleagues had experienced with the aircraft.
The committee also heard from the AAIB investigator that the evidence as to what had happened was "extremely thin" and it was impossible to rule out that the controls had jammed.
Both witness A and Sqn Ldr Robert Burke, who at the time of the crash was the maintenance test pilot for the special forces flight, gave evidence suggesting control jam was a possibility.
The truth was that no one would ever know why the helicopter had crashed, the committee concluded.
Relatives of the pilots welcomed the report which, they said, effectively cleared them and called on the MoD to reverse its verdict.