One needs to recognise that;
a. This report was the subject of questions by the Public Accounts Committee to the Chief of Defence Procurement in March 1998, when CDP admitted the issues it reported (systemic airworthiness failings and, specifically, problems on Chinook HC Mk2) still existed. That is public knowledge and has been commented on numerous times on this, Nimrod and C130 threads. One hopes this information was submitted to previous inquiries and in previous submissions, not just to Lord Philip. Assuming it was, is it not astonishing it was ignored?
b. MoD (via Minister for the Armed Forces, Adam Ingram) are on record as denying the main issues of the report (in doing so, wholly contradicting the above evidence to the PAC and, subsequently, the Haddon-Cave Report); issues that the BBC report captioned. I would like to think previous submissions sought to refute this claim. If so, these overtures were clearly ignored and one should ask why.
As stated, this report is nothing new. MoD's reaction to it has been in the public domain for at least 13 years and can be read in Hansard. Any investigative journalist worth his salt could track this down and recognise immediately the story therein - that MoD have consistently lied on this and other cases and, had the report and others like it been implemented, many lives would have been saved. Perhaps the media see this as a public interest story. It should certainly interest all those who serve.
Perhaps one should ask why no action was taken by the recipients in 1992, some of whom are the Campaign's most vocal opponents. Is Lord Philip to interview them? If they had done their duty, perhaps more cognisance would have been taken of Boscombe Down's recommendation that the aircraft should NOT enter service until made safe. An all too common theme I'm afraid.