The verdict
For more than seven years, the families of two pilots blamed for an RAF helicopter crash which left 29 dead have fought to clear their sons' names. This week, their battle against the military establishment reaches a climax. By John Arlidge
Sunday February 3, 2002. .The Observer
AT 7.30 on Tuesday morning, a 67-year-old former RAF and Concorde pilot will pour himself a cup of coffee, shower, put on a grey single-breasted suit, white shirt and dark blue tie, and drive the 10 miles from his Hampshire home to Fleet station to catch the 9.08 to Waterloo. . .One hundred and fifty miles away in Kings Lynn, Norfolk, a 66-year-old retired banker will get into his blue Citroen estate and drive with his wife Hazel to London.
Then, towards 11am, John Cook and Mike Tapper will walk together down the claret and gold corridors of the House of Lords past the coats of arms of the chiefs of the defence staff and head for the Office of Printed Paper just outside the debating chamber.
Their journey is the final step in an eight-year search for truth that began on the evening of 2 June 1994 when they received the telephone call from the Ministry of Defence that every serviceman's family dreads. 'I'm very sorry. I have some bad news,' the voice of the end of the line said. 'A Chinook helicopter is down on the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland. I'm afraid your...'
The two fathers knew what would come next. Their sons Rick, 30, and Jonathan, 28, were Chinook pilots. Shortly before midnight MoD officials called at the family homes to confirm the worst. Rick and Jonathan - along with everyone else on board flight Zulu Delta 576 - were dead.
The 1994 Chinook crash remains the RAF's worst peacetime accident. It killed two elite special forces pilots, two experienced crewmen, and 25 of the most senior SAS and MI5 counter-terrorist officers, including the head of Special Branch in Northern Ireland.
The accident has also become the biggest peace-time public relations headache for the Ministry of Defence.
For the past eight years the dead pilots' families, former Cabinet Ministers, MPs from all parties, Gulf war veterans, journalists and film-makers, and members of the House of Lords have accused the MoD of unfairly blaming the pilots for the crash - besmirching the reputation of men who died doing their duty.
At 11am on Tuesday, when the House of Lords Select Committee to review the Chinook crash publishes its report into the tragedy, both sides hope the truth will finally emerge. The Ministry of Defence believes its finding that the pilots were guilty of 'gross negligence' will be confirmed. The families want the Lords to clear their sons' names.
There is more than the reputation of two dead airmen at stake. If the Lords decide the MoD's verdict is wrong, it will provoke an unprecedented constitutional clash between the military and Parliament. MPs and peers will demand that the MoD publicly clears the pilots of blame and apologises to their families - something senior officers have never done before.
A cairn at the summit of the 1,400ft Beinn na Lice - 'Mountain of the stone slab'- on the southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre marks the spot where the two-rotor Chinook hit the ground at 150mph and exploded into a fireball at around 6pm on 2 June 1994.
The scene that confronted police and local doctors from Campbeltown who were first on the scene was the worst many had seen. 'It was misty but you could see burning bodies strapped into their seats. Burning, burning everywhere,' recalls local GP Geoffrey Horton.
When sun lit up the charred slopes the next morning, it was plain that the aircraft, en route from RAF Aldergrove near Belfast to a security conference near Inverness, should either have climbed or turned left away from the Kintyre peninsula into clear airspace. But it never did. Why not?
Cook and Tapper were elite special forces pilots; they were so good that they could fly helicopters backwards at night. Was it possible that the two men had simply flown through low cloud into a hill? With no survivors, no eyewitness, no 'black box' flight data recorder, no cockpit voice recorder, and no radar trace, it was clear from the start that trying to piece together what happened would be as hard as trying to reassemble the helicopter from the wreckage. And so it has proved.
There have been half a dozen separate inquiries and almost the only thing anyone can agree on is that sabotage was not to blame. The House of Lords inquiry is likely to be the final investigation. The families of the dead pilots say they will accept the peers' findings whatever they are. MoD officials say it is 'too early' to comment.
The Lords report will centre on whether the two pilots were to blame. That was the conclusion of two senior RAF officers, Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten and Air Vice Marshal John Day, who overruled the findings of the RAF's own internal inquiry which concluded in 1995 that, while it was impossible 'to determine a definite cause' there were 'no human failings'. Wratten and Day insisted the pilots had made a series of careless, navigational errors and flown too low, too fast.
Their decision to overrule the findings of the RAF's own investigators infuriated the Tappers and the Cooks, who believed the MoD had breached its own rules which stated that dead air crews should be blamed for an accident only 'if there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever'. Their fury and sense of injustice grew when the MoD refused to reopen the case after a Scottish fatal accident inquiry in 1996 publicly cleared the pilots and said the RAF investigation was 'flawed'.
The 1996 verdict prompted the two families to take the unprecedented step of taking on the military establishment. The campaign they launched six years ago and which reaches a climax on Tuesday has been one of the most remarkable in military history.
It has united former and serving military men, sceptical journalists and film-makers, technical experts, former and serving Tory Cabinet Ministers and Labour and Lib Dem peers.
Between 1996 and last year this unlikely band of investigators uncovered so much evidence casting doubt on the safety of the Chinook that they forced no fewer than three parliamentary committees to launch their own inquiries. Few subjects have been so closely examined by so many different parliamen tarians or picked over on television and in the pages of specialist magazines.
The House of Commons Defence Select Committee inquiry first leant weight to the MoD's case, concluding there were no fundamental flaws in the design of the helicopter. But later the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded there was not enough evidence to hang the reputations of the pilots. The MoD was guilty of 'unwarrantable arrogance' and the verdict of gross negligence should be overturned.
On Tuesday the Lords will have the final say. Over the past six months a five-peer committee, led by a senior judge, has gone back over every piece of evidence and interviewed the key players, including Wratten and Day. At the centre of their inquiry was fresh evidence that the computer software controlling the engines on the Chinook Mk II was unsafe.
Peers heard evidence - not presented to previous inquiries - that the engines had a terrifying habit of massively speeding up or slowing down the rotors for no reason and leaving no physical or electronic trace. On one occasion a power surge destroyed a Chinook on the ground. In another unexplained case a Chinook flipped upside down in flight before righting itself again 250ft above the ground.
Could a sudden 'engine runaway' explain why two pilots with exemplary records flew straight into the side of a hill? Were there enough question marks over safety to make a finding of gross negligence unsafe?
In a few weeks the once blackened slopes of Beinn na Lice will be covered with purple heather again. Except for the cairn, which gets a little bigger each June when visiting relatives of the dead add stones, there is no sign of the tragedy. But the marks left on the reputations of Flt Lt Rick Cook and Flt Lt John Tapper have not been erased.
The families hope the Lords report will end their fight to clear their sons' names. As Mike Tapper puts it: 'We have never said it could not be pilot error. Experienced pilots can make mistakes. But we do say there are so many doubts surrounding what happened that it is impossible to be sure. That's all we've ever asked for - all our sons would have expected of us. Is that too much?' On Tuesday they will find out.