Nimrod Safety Case (H-C Report)
The H-C report devotes some 161 pages to the Nimrod safety case. It condemns it in many ways, and criticizes eight people. The irony of it all is that there was no requirement to produce a safety case for a legacy aircraft with an imminent OSD, such as Nimrod. This is made clear in Baber's inquest statement and is confirmed by DE&S. Furthermore, Baber goes on to state that the exercise was carried out in an "economic manner", and "clearly if we made it far too complicated the whole aircraft would be out of service by the time we finished".
Also, on page 235, H-C claims that the three BAES people involved in the August meeting took a "deliberate and conscious decision" (H-C opinion)not to mention the "open and unclassified" hazards. Yet in Baber's inquest statement he says "at that point there were a range of still open hazards". So he knew about them. Surely, if he thought he had been deceived he would have reveled that to the coroner.
The Nimrod safety case became an issue because Baber's predecessor "decided to take a far more rigorous approach and decided to go for a better safety case than just assuming the the release to service [which was the required level] would be adequate"
In order to present a "balanced" review, I believe issues such as these should have been mentioned in the report. The IPTL was guilty of many things, but to be damned for doing something, that need not have been done in the first place does give the impression that a "hit list" was drawn up very early on, and evidence and the QC's personal opinion made to fit. Once again, these are the sort of things that any competent legal defence team will latch onto.
DV