I think a point I wanted to make was that it is not the contributors here on pprune who suddenly raised the airworthiness questions. The Board of Inquiry report did. Then the Mull Group in their submissions.
What probably exercises the minds of Tecumseh, Chugalug and others is that both stopped there, seemingly blissfully unaware the evidence they were hearing and reporting was of systemic airworthiness failings. To digress a second, what must the Nimrod and C130 families think of this lost opportunity to prevent the need for Haddon-Cave 20 years ago?
This is why I tried to rationalise why the Campaign would seemingly want to ignore this evidence, once it became clear it was part of a bigger malaise. It seems to me it is the one part of the tragedy that is incontrovertible fact.
It does not reveal the cause and I think that is the wrong way to look at it anyway. There is almost never a single cause, but a chain of events conspire against you. MoD concentrates on the final event, the few seconds before impact. It detracts from its organisational shortcomings that weakened the rest of the chain. The airworthiness failings noted by witnesses is a series of broken links in that chain and I wonder why this has never been properly pursued. I always seem to come back to this question. That is why I like to see it debated here because I share the view that this is the evidence that would have stopped Wratten and Day in their tracks.
Chinook 240, this may answer part of your question. An aircraft being unairworthy does not mean they all suddenly crash. It weakens the chain and increases probability of occurrence. In such a small fleet 6 crashes attributed to airworthiness failings is an alarming statistic. Perhaps what improved is as simple as learning from experience. This is a point Tecumseh makes best, talking of immaturity in 1994, but with time and experience that particular link was replaced. What this report from 1992 tells us is that this immaturity was known and ignored. Someone played fast and loose with aircrew lives and lost. That single fact should be enough to cast doubt on the verdict and I hope it has been made to the Review.