More Speculation and Selective Quotations
Cazatou,
It must be something in the water in France! Yet again you are relying on selective quotations to justify, perhaps to yourself given your apparent involvement at the time, an unjustifiable verdict, and given that verdict you are again you are saying that you know the cause of the accident - nobody knows the cause of the accident and even the Senior Reviewing Officer says that he is relying on speculation to reach his verdict - this is NOT a sustainable basis for a finding of Gross Negligence - it is an opinion that has been tested and failed in the House of Lords with amongst others an Appeal Court judge finding against it. This thread is not about finding the cause of the accident - it is about overturning an unjustified verdict which impugns the reputation of two pilots and their families who were not able to defend themselves at the time of the BoI.
In my opinion the BoI were directed in their investigation and findings, and clear evidence which would have cast doubt on the aircraft’s fitness for purpose on that fateful day, such as the BD position, was withheld not only from them but even later at the Sherriff's FAI. However, even with that excuse the BoI's deliberations on the airworthiness and engineering side were totally inadequate as was any engineering review of the BoI (if indeed there was any) by 1Gp and HQSTC engineering staffs! IMHO given the circumstances of the Chinook Mk 2's introduction to service the whole system was very keen to find aircrew error, and if the Reviewing Officers had stuck to a verdict of "balance of probabilities of aircrew error with potential mitigating circumstances" (effectively the conclusion of the main BoI) they would have "got away with it" - instead 15 years on the arguments have not, and will not, go away because justice has still not prevailed.
We can all speculate - how about this as an alternative!
Imagine you are the Captain of a Chinook Mk 2 helicopter flying 25 VIP passengers, all connected with the security services in Northern Ireland between Belfast and Inverness. As well as being aircraft Captain you are the Flight Commander of the Chinook detachment and you are part of a Special Forces crew. You have a reputation for obeying the rules, and your peers consider you are one of the pilots best able to cope with the many problems that the aircraft is having during its introduction to service. You have planned a low level Visual Flight Rules flight, with a waypoint just before the Mull of Kintyre, where you plan to turn left along the west of the coast staying VFR. The weather was considered, by the subsequent BoI (paras 8, 42 and 67b amongst other comments), to be suitable for undertaking such a flight. You are flying at a fairly high speed, but well within the cleared speed envelope. You have a strong tailwind, which has made the flight a short one up to this point. You are visible to a yachtsman, who can see you, the Mull shrouded in cloud, and the breakers under the lighthouse at the foot of the Mull. You know exactly where you are and you change the planned course at the waypoint, but instead of making the turn you and the two experienced crewmen in the cockpit with you, including your fellow Chinook captain, who is flying the aircraft, decide to fly directly towards the cloud shrouded Mull even though to over fly it would mean breaking the RAF’s rules for operating the aircraft. You then set a rate of climb that will not allow you to clear the Mull, crashing into it some 600 ft below the summit. Twenty-nine people have just died as a result of yours and your colleagues “suicidal” decision and the two pilots will certainly deserve a verdict of “Gross Negligence” at the subsequent Board of Inquiry.
In scenario two, you are still the Captain on the same mission. As before you know exactly where you are and you change the planned course at the waypoint. However, this time you are flying an aircraft that you do not trust, having had your Flight Commander at Odiham refuse your request to retain a Chinook Mk1 for the mission. You know that your aircraft has many operating problems linked to serious flight safety hazards – indeed the RAF’s own flight test authority had recommended against giving it even an interim release to service but had been over-ruled. The trials Chinook Mk2 has just been grounded by the Flight Test organisation at Boscombe Down based on 15 serious incidents on in-service aircraft, one of which, just days before, was on the aircraft you are flying and was judged one of the 5 most serious and unexplained incidents leading to the gounding decision - but you do not know this, and the RAF is continuing, on its own authority, to operate those that are in service. Your aircraft has a very poor recent history of engine, engine control system and flight control system defects, and the investigations on these are still ongoing when the aircraft is transferred to your Detachment just two days previously. Whilst in Northern Ireland the aircraft has had some unrecorded (and hence illegal) maintenance work carried out within the systems that have been part of this defect history, and the aircraft would appear to be carrying an incipient electrical fault. As you make the planned turn, and the vibration levels on the aircraft increase something goes wrong – an engine runaway, a false engine fail caption causing distraction or even a control restriction affecting your ability to fly the aircraft at all (not ruled out in the subsequent AAIB investigation) all being possible scenarios. Your first job is to regain control of the aircraft, and rectify the problem, but first you have to recognise it, and the Chinook Mk 2 fleet has a documented history of false cockpit warning indications as well as very poor Flight Reference Cards. Your aircraft’s problem and the strong tailwind have carried you along your pre-waypoint change track towards the Mull, and now you are possibly IMC in cloud. You put the engines to emergency power to try to gain the height you know you need to clear the Mull. Tragically you fail.
Neither the Reviewing Officers, who for 15 years have gone for the “Gross Negligence” verdict of scenario one, nor myself with scenario two (seen as a perfectly plausible one by many better qualified than myself to put it forward) actually know what happened. The difference is that I am just seeking to put forward a plausible series of events as an alternative (and uninvestigated) cause, not to use speculation as the basis for an unjustified finding of what in civilian life would be a verdict of manslaughter.
I could go further and counter all of the selective quotations you have used (incidentally I think you meant para 30c not 32c) but there is little point – I will just reply with one selective quotation of my own
61. With no ADR or CVR, survivors or eyewitnesses, the Board based its findings on logical argument derived from the limited evidence available to it. There were many potential causes of the accident and despite detailed and in depth analysis, the Board was unable to determine a definite cause. However, most potential causes could be dismissed or considered unlikely, and the Board concluded that there were only 3 likely scenarios that could be considered fully consistent with the evidence. In deciding which one of these 3 was the most probable cause, the Board could not avoid a degree of speculation.
As you were obviously “in the know” how about answering the real questions I asked in my last posting re why the Station Commander’s first 5 paragraphs are totally different from para 6 of his comments (you can see the join!), and how did the analysis of the Glen Ogle accident (which took place at the same time with the same people involved), and where no speculation as to what happened was needed, come to such different conclusions?
JB