An even more damning Boscombe Down letter
Although I have given details of this a long time ago there is, in my view, an even more damning Boscombe Down letter dated 6 June 1994 from the Director of T & E (P&A) to DHP and MOD in addition to the OC RWTS letter aired last week on C4 news. The 6 June letter was not being wise after the event - it concerned matters that had been dicussed at a meeting on 25 May where, inter alia, it was noted that Boscombe had serious concerns about 15 in-service incidents of which 4 were listed in some detail as being a cause of major concern. The last of these four was on ZD 576 on 19 May as detailed in Brian's last post. What is interesting is that following the incident on 19 May ZD 576 was fitted with the engine from the first of these 4 "major" incidents which had been "no fault found". These in-service incidents were, if the letter is to be believed, the second main cause of Boscombe Down stopping their flight trials - thus contrary to what was said in Parliament it was not just a case of FADEC software and BD pedantry about the lack of an audit trail. Were these in-service incidents relevant to the accident - well we don't and never will know. Should they have been looked at by the BoI - yes very definitely - might they have raised more doubts - well I certainly think they should have done
As far as I am aware there is no evidence that the BD letters, and certainly not that of 6 June, were ever brought to the attention of the BoI, and I could not even be certain that the Reviewing Officers saw the 6 June letter (although we do know that the MOD Main Building copy went to Hels2, Flight Safety and ACAS with a note commenting that "by the time you see this it will have been overtaken by events"!). What we also know is that when DHP provided his brief to the MOD Legal Team for the Sherriff's FAI he did not mention either of these key BD letters - I would not think that he would have forgotten about them, so being cynical my personal assumption would have to be that MOD did not want these brought up as they would then have had to give them to the other side - just a personal opinion which I would be happy to be corrected on. As we all know, even without the benefit of the further doubts these letters would almost certainly have created the Sherriff did not anyway accept the gross negligence verdict. Also, as far as I am aware the 6 June letter did not get shown to the H of L Committee, but I am not at home so cannot check the transcripts to confirm this.
JB