IMHO Airsound has put his finger on a key point:
My fear is that the investigation of this broad view will turn out not to have been ‘within the remit’ of the BOI.
Charlie Luncher said in his plea to TD
I think, if it is worth anything to you, is that you are delaying the BOI and its findings.
The MoD is saying the BOI will not now report next month so Charlie Luncher seems to be correct. The most likely explanation for that given official briefings last week that it would report in late November seems to me to be that the BOI had not seen those emails.
If that is the case, then the leaking of those emails can only help the BOI get to the bottom of this and I suspect whoever leaked them almost certainly did it out of concern that the BOI was not aware of their existence.
What is more worrying is that this is not the first time the BOI has been recovened following publication of information uncovered by TD and others. Biggus what Nigel says about the report being written several months ago is absolutely correct and was confirmed off the record by the MoD back in June when it was reconvened for the first time.
It was reconvened after it emerged that the Kinloss Station Commander had warned in August 2005 - in the wake of the burst hot air pipe on XV227 - that an “unexpected failure” was likely on Nimrod given that it was already 10 years past its out-of-service date.
The most sensible interpretation of reconvening to look at the XV227 case is that the BOI’s remit did not go back that far. What is more puzzling is why its remit did not include the discussions covered in the emails, which ran from December 2005 to February 2006 and centred on the need to get XV230’s leak problems fixed.