For those of you who don't read the Grauniad!
RAF chiefs woo lords in Chinook challenge
Retired officers fight to keep blame on dead aircrew
Stuart Millar
Wednesday November 28, 2001
The Guardian
Some of the RAF's senior former officers have been accused of challenging the authority of parliament by trying to pre-empt the findings of an inquiry into the air force's worst peacetime disaster.
Two months before a special select committee of the House of Lords is due to deliver its findings on the crash of a Chinook helicopter on the Mull of Kintyre in 1994 with the loss of all 29 on board, the group of retired top brass will tonight begin a campaign to sidestep the committee and win over peers to the official RAF version of events that the pilots were to blame.
The Lords inquiry was charged with examining whether the verdict of gross negligence against the pilots of Chinook Zulu Delta 576 - in effect a verdict of manslaughter - was justified when the RAF's own rules at the time stated that only in cases where there was "absolutely no doubt whatsoever" could deceased aircrew be blamed. Since the loss of ZD576, evidence has emerged that the fleet was experiencing technical problems which, campaigners argue, could have contributed to the crash.
The committee finished hearing evidence last month and is due to produce its findings by January 31 .
But in a move described by one critic as the "RAF establishment getting its retaliation in first", peers have received an invitation to a meeting today at which retired Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten will explain why he and the then Air Vice Marshal Sir John Day found the pilots guilty of gross negligence.
Details of the meeting, organised by Lord Craig, a former Chief of Defence Staff and Marshal of the RAF, were obtained by the Guardian and Computer Weekly, which has played a key role in uncovering evidence of technical failures in the Chinook fleet.
The invitation is accompanied by a letter containing criticism of the Lords committee and its handling of the inquiry from Sir Michael Graydon and Sir Richard Johns, the chiefs of air staff at the time of the crash.
The letter from Sir Michael and Sir Richard opens: "For those unfamiliar with aviation matters and flying in particular, it is not easy to understand... the complexities which are raised in an aircraft accident investigation. Equally, what is clear to a pilot through his/her own experience may be far from obvious to those who have no flying experience."
It continues: "The select committee has spent much of its time examining possible technical failings... These technical hypotheses, as our letter makes clear, are irrelevant."
Lord Chalfont, chairman of the all-party Mull of Kintyre group which led the campaign for a Lords inquiry, said: "This seems to be suggesting that the only people who can handle this thing are senior RAF officers and everybody else should just stay out of it.
"A lot of peers have said to me that this raises a dangerous constitutional point because they seem to be setting themselves up as being above parliament."
The letter is also being taken as criticism of the Commons public accounts committee, which produced a damning report in November last year accusing the the MoD of "unwarrantable arrogance" over the Chinook crash.
David Davis, then chairman of the PAC and now Tory party chairman, described today's meeting as "inappropriate".
The MoD said that it had nothing to do with the meeting.