Here is the Hansard link to yesterday's debate: "Safety of the RAF Nimrod Fleet":
http://pubs1.tso.parliament.uk/pa/cm...08070171000005
Try this if link does not work;
RAF Nimrod Fleet: 1 Jul 2008: Westminster Hall debates (TheyWorkForYou.com)
The text version of the opening statement follows below. Media coverage from today's Scotsman, Daily Record, Press and Journal and BBC.
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RAF Nimrod Fleet
12.30 pm
Angus Robertson (Moray) (SNP): I welcome this opportunity to raise the important matter of the safety of the RAF Nimrod fleet, a subject relating largely to the tragedy that befell Nimrod XV230 in Afghanistan on 2 September 2006 in which 14 brave service personnel lost their lives. This debate is also about the lessons that have emerged since then from the board of inquiry and the coroner’s inquest; from information that has come to light through freedom of information requests; from the Ministry of Defence’s reaction to those developments; and in time, we hope, from the independent review conducted by Charles Haddon-Cave, QC, into the broader issues surrounding the loss of XV230.
The Minister will appreciate that, as the Nimrod MR2 fleet is stationed at RAF Kinloss in my constituency, the issues are of direct concern. Safety questions affect all air and ground crew as well as civilian workers, who take great and justifiable pride in their work and want to secure the highest safety standards. Safety questions affect the families of those who died aboard Nimrod XV230 and those who continue to fly the Nimrod fleet. Safety questions remain for many experts and former RAF personnel who have watched the developments and have significant concerns. Safety questions also remain for me as a constituency MP. In the absence of appropriate, detailed information from the Ministry of Defence, I have had to rely on FOI requests, letters to and from the MOD, and statements by Ministers in the media. Safety questions remain because the ageing Nimrod fleet has experienced continual fuel leaks; because there is a repeated inability to get planes airborne; and, most recently, because the coroner’s inquest expressly recommended that the fleet should be grounded until risk levels are as low as reasonably practicable.
On 4 December 2007, the official board of inquiry published its findings on the loss of XV230. The board believed that the No. 7 tank dry bay was the most likely location for the seat of the fire and the most probable cause was escaped fuel contacting a supplementary conditioning pack air pipe at 400º C
“after entering a gap between two types of insulation”.
Four separate factors were listed as contributing to the accident: the age of the aircraft, the maintenance policy, the failure of hazard analysis and the lack of a fire detection and suppression system, and the failure to identify the full implications of successive changes to the fuel system and associated procedures.
In an oral statement to the House of Commons on the same day, the Secretary of State for Defence said:
“At the time of the accident, the Department took action to ensure that a similar scenario could not occur again on the Nimrod aircraft. Those measures have been revised as the board’s findings have emerged. The chain of command has accepted the majority of the board’s recommendations and continues to pursue the outstanding recommendations made by the board to enhance the safety of our aircraft.
The hot air system remains switched off so that there is no hot pipe against which any fuel could ignite, and we have an enhanced inspection regime to examine for any sign of fuel leakage. QinetiQ has conducted an independent investigation into the fuel system and confirmed that, in light of the measures taken since the crash, the fuel system is safe to operate.”
I shall return to that point. He went on:
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“Air-to-air refuelling has also been suspended subject to further investigation. The Chief of the Air Staff’s professional judgment is that the Nimrod fleet is safe to fly. I have accepted his advice.”—[Official Report, 4 December 2007; Vol. 468, c. 686-87.]
In my reply to the statement, I said to the Secretary of State:
“Only recently, another Nimrod aircraft suffered a serious fuel leak and it has proved impossible fully to understand why it happened. It is also a cause for concern that the inquiry confirmed the loss of experienced engineering personnel from RAF Kinloss. Will the Secretary of State confirm that the Ministry of Defence will do everything in its power to restore confidence in the Nimrod fleet, which performs such a vital military role?”
The Secretary of State answered:
“I have no hesitation in giving him the reassurance that he seeks. The safety of those who fly in these aircraft is our priority; it is not secondary to any other consideration. I have given careful thought to the issue of age and to all the other issues identified in the BOI as contributory factors. I am assured—and I accept those assurances—by those who have the vast technical ability and experience to understand these matters, and having gone into them in detail myself, that this aircraft is safe to fly and airworthy. I would not allow it to fly if I did not believe that to be the case.—[Official Report, 4 December 2007; Vol. 468, c. 693-94.]
That statement of confidence by the Ministry of Defence was followed in May by the coroner’s inquest. During the proceedings, which I attended, the court heard about the development of the Nimrod in the 1950s from the world’s first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet. To make the Nimrod into a military aircraft, the Hawker Siddeley company added extra fuel tanks and a whole new bottom half to the Comet’s fuselage. Crucially, it also changed the engines, which meant installing a hot air pipe system to start the new Spey engines.
The hot pipe system crosses the centre section of the aircraft to enter the wings, where the engines are, passing through an area called dry bay 7, which was to become well known to the inquest. It is the area around the new No. 7 tanks, and it also contains fuel feed pipes. That should not have been a problem, as the hot air system was used only for engine starting. However, when the early Nimrod MR1 was developed into the MR2 version in the late 1970s, an extra cooling pack was added for all the new electronic equipment. Such packs work off hot air, from the cross feed pipe, which meant that the pipe had to be used continuously.
In dry bay 7, the cross feed pipe, operating at temperatures of 400º C to 500º C, was next to the large fuel feed pipes. That was a serious fire hazard, and it should have alerted the continuous safety assessment systems operated by the RAF and BAE Systems, the present aircraft maker, to the potential hazards. The coroner, Andrew Walker, said:
“I am satisfied that the design modifications to the MR2 made the aircraft unsafe to fly. This serious flaw in the design was not discovered despite a baseline safety case study undertaken by the (Nimrod) Integrated Project Team and the manufacturer.”
Mr. Walker added that in a previous incident to a Tornado aircraft, fuel had been drawn into the lagging around a hot pipe and had ignited, causing the loss of the aircraft. There had been no follow-up on the Nimrod, despite a recommendation from the RAF board of inquiry. He said:
“This cavalier approach must come to an end. In my view, it was this very source of ignition that, on the balance of probability, caused the loss of Nimrod XV230 with all souls on board.”
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The coroner went on to detail failures of the so-called Cassandra hazard log, another matter to which I shall return. Had failures been recorded properly in the log and dealt with, the design flaw in the Nimrod fleet would have been discovered. He said:
“I simply do not understand”
how the Cassandra system could have assumed that there was a fire detection and suppression system in dry bay 7 when there was clearly no such system and there never had been. That meant that the crew of XV230 could do nothing to prevent the fire from developing into an explosive ignition of fuel in tank 7 in the wing root. The coroner added in his final verdict that
“the deaths were in part the result of failures...on the part of the aircraft manufacturer and those responsible for the safety of the aircraft”.
Mr. Walker recommended to the Defence Secretary that the whole Nimrod fleet should not fly again until the risks thrown up by the inquest have been reduced to a level known as ALARP, or as low as reasonably practicable. The Nimrod integrated project team leader, Group Captain Hickman, had already said in evidence that that was not expected to happen until the end of 2008. Asked if the process could be speeded up, Group Captain Hickman replied:
“No, it is driven by resources.”
I appreciate that the situation presents the MOD with a huge problem. The Nimrod performs an important role for the UK armed forces and coalition allies. It is also true that there is no replacement aircraft immediately available for the work and that the replacement Nimrod MRA4 is a few years off. Nevertheless, it was a surprise to all who attended the coroner’s inquest that literally within minutes of his lengthy summing-up, the Minister issued a statement refusing to accept the inquest’s main recommendation. It was, in my view, a rushed reaction. It cannot have been considered, and it illustrates my concerns about the developments.
I shall highlight three areas on which there has been precious little considered information from the MOD. In the 15 minutes that the Minister has following my contribution, he has an opportunity to provide details that I hope will reassure everybody about the safety concerns with regard to risk management, the hazard log and responsibility. First, on risk management, as I have already outlined, the Secretary of State assured the House that Nimrod was safe, citing a report by QinetiQ, the defence consultancy. To establish whether that was factually correct has been difficult, and it took an FOI request to establish that the report said that the aircraft would not be fully safe until its 30 recommendations were carried out. All but one of those related to a failure to implement mandatory airworthiness regulations.
The inquest heard that, if the risk of something going wrong on a plane is only “tolerable”, MOD rules stipulate that it must be further reduced to make it
“as low as reasonably practicable”
before the plane can be declared safe. In a letter to me on 19 May 2008, the Defence Secretary said that of the 30 recommendations, 21 have been accepted by the MOD and are still being implemented, six relate to air-to-air refuelling, which is no longer done with Nimrods, and three more are still being considered.
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On 26 May, I wrote to Secretary of State asking:
“Please could you make a status report on all 24 recommendations which do not relate to Air-to-Air refuelling? How many have been implemented in full already? When specifically do you expect the remaining recommendations to be implemented in full?”
I am still waiting for an answer! Two weeks ago, in the defence procurement debate, I asked the very same questions, and the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg), said he would write to me. Again, I am still waiting for an answer. Today, Minister, I expect answers, and the questions are the same: how many of the 30 QinetiQ safety recommendations have been implemented in full, and when specifically does the MOD expect the remaining recommendations to be implemented in full?
Secondly, as the Minister must know, QinetiQ has already raised an issue relating to the structure of the Cassandra hazard log and linking of hazards to causes, controls and supporting evidence. It proved very difficult, if not impossible, to track the accident from the hazard back to the cause and the corresponding controls, and then to establish whether the controls had been fully implemented. In addition, it was found that the assessment of probability made assumptions concerning the implementation of recommendations that proved not to be valid, and supporting evaluations were found to be contradictory.
It was unclear which recommendations and controls required implementation to support the hazard probability. Furthermore, hazard controls often did not apply to all causes of hazard and, therefore, did not mitigate the hazard in full, but mitigated only specific causes. It proved impossible, therefore, to validate the hazard probability. QinetiQ recommended that the hazard log be restructured to facilitate ease of further review. It argued that that would clarify hazard-accident risk controls, the hazard causes to which they apply and the status of their implementation, which would in turn clarify the argument underpinning the evaluation of risk. In view of the importance placed on the Cassandra hazard log in determining Nimrod safety, what steps have been taken by the MOD and the integrated project team to implement QinetiQ’s important recommendations? With the current hazard log in such a confusing state, how can anyone claim that Nimrod is safe to operate?
My third point is simple, but crucial, and relates to responsibility: has any action been taken in relation to those with delegated responsibility for Nimrod airworthiness at the time of the Nimrod crash? Safety worries about the Nimrod fleet will remain as long as concerning incidents continue. With more than 111 fuel leaks since the crash of XV230, and the regular grounding of aircraft, those concerns remain and will remain until the MOD maintains its aircraft to its own applicable risk standard which must be as low as reasonably practicable, and for as long as it fails to restore confidence in the Nimrod fleet as promised.
Visits to RAF Kinloss by the Secretary of State are welcome—I have said that on the Floor of the House—and his participation in a Nimrod test flight was a statement of confidence, but that is not enough. Ministers have failed to make written or oral statements to the House of Commons when necessary, have imparted key information only after a coroner demanded it and released key studies only after freedom of information requests were made. Asserting from a television studio that the
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Nimrod fleet is safe is not good enough. I know that the Minister wants the best for our service personnel, as do I, and I strongly urge him to answer my questions, because otherwise this matter will not rest.