While there MAY have been some action by the crew that was not strictly in accordance with the regulations (and as non-aircrew I can’t possibly comment) I though the Haddon-Cave report would stop people concentrating on the “final act”.
This report quite clearly reiterates what people with airworthiness delegation have hammered into them from day 1 – everyone is responsible for safety and you lost Crown Immunity in 1993. It has taken the Nimrod tragedy for this to finally sink in and the impact on other cases, notably Mull, is clear. As I outlined above, gross negligence is far easier to demonstrate against those involved in releasing the aircraft to service.
If MoD were to order a “Haddon-Cave” report on Chinook the first, and possibly only, question necessary would be “What part of “positively dangerous” did you not understand, or thought you could ignore?”. This negligence was infinitely worse than anything those named by H-C did (which, God knows, was bad enough). At the very least there should be a document signed by the Chinook Project Director, to his boss (DHP), his 2 Star (DGA2) and 3 Star (CA) outlining why he believed the Boscombe statement wrong. No-one in his right mind would sign a recommendation or CA Release with this Boscombe statement hanging over them. Yet, at the time, and for some years thereafter, it was common for pressure to be brought to bear on Boscombe staff to dilute such reports, in order to prevent slippage or cost overruns. I've seen them cave in, so it is indicative of the scale of the problem, and to their eternal credit, that they stuck to their guns.
Turning to Walter’s secret and devious kit. He will always have a point given, for example, a BoI witness declined to name “classified” kit that was in the aircraft. Yet, there is no record of a Classified Supplement to the Release to Service. (The CS should be noted, but is not promulgated in the main document).
I guess many here will dismiss this as fanny detail, but it is fundamental to the airworthiness of the aircraft. It is a simple question – like many that the investigation simply did not address. The regulations and design procedures exist to ensure you simply can’t bring electronic kit into the aircraft and use it willy-nilly. The same regulations recognise that aircrew are not infallible, that they will sometimes make mistakes. That is why you have defences in depth, yet all the evidence shows that these defences were not provided; indeed knowingly omitted or allowed to erode. Read Haddon-Cave: substitute “Chinook” for “Nimrod” and it still makes perfect sense.