Before I comment, I must declare an interest. Tomorrow, on 30 September, I will celebrate the 52nd anniversary of becoming the 664th pilot to save their life using a Martin Baker ejection seat. A year or so later, I attended a gala dinner at The Dorchester after Martin-Baker notched up their 1000th success. Not a single ejection, within the design limits of the seat had been unsuccessful. Subsequently, several thousand more, 7506 precisely, are here today because of the brilliance of Martin-Baker engineering. Writing to me in October 1964, Sir James Martin, Managing Director and Chief Designer said “as the person responsible for the design of all our various ejection seats, it naturally causes me great pleasure (to hear about your escape).” At the same time, Sir James extended a “hearty” invitation to have lunch and visit the works. It took me until the 50th anniversary year, 2014, to accept the invitation. Meantime, for the rest of my flying career, I happily entrusted my survival to Martin Baker seats. It is vital not to underestimate the psychological effect of knowing that you were flying with the world’s best and most reliable escape apparatus. Put simply, Martin Baker was a benchmark for engineering excellence and reliability. Visiting the factory in September 2014, it was impossible not to be impressed by the sheer dedication and attention to detail in every aspect of their Denham factory.
During my RAF career of nearly 35 years, I had the duty to investigate 2 high-profile aircraft accidents, one of which resulted in the death of 9 crew members, so I am fairly well acquainted with the investigation process and most of the other human consequences that such investigations inevitably yield. The aim of the accident investigation is to determine the cause and much mental effort is devoted to isolating the root cause of the accident from other factors which merely contributed to the accident. I expect that this inquiry team, together with its convening authority, would have been presented with a similar challenge. The trouble with aircraft accidents is that they often result from a sequence of events, none of which, in isolation would necessarily have caused the accident. The day that “Murphy’s Law” strikes the sequence of events, design failure, technical failure, maintenance error, human error etc, has been allowed to continue to a conclusion. It follows that, quite often, humans can spot things before they go wrong, interrupting the fatal chain before catastrophe strikes. Often, humans are unaware of the dangerous turn of events and so they do nothing. Very rarely, humans disregard the warning signs that their expertise and training should have equipped them to see. In this case, the inquiry will determine whether any personnel had been “negligent” and whether they should be held to blame for their action or inaction. Proving negligence is not straightforward for the living and, at least in my day, almost impossible for the deceased. Often, in the absence of categorical proof, sleeping dogs must be left to lie. This doesn’t, however, prevent lessons from being learned and procedures to prevent recurrence being enforced. Hopefully, before all this occurs, risk assessments will have identified most, but crucially never “all,” of what could go wrong.
I do not know very much about the “Military Aviation Authority” since this tri-service organisation replaced the Inspectorate of Flight Safety which used to be responsible for accident investigations in my day but I do not suppose that the principles of investigation are very much different. I am certain there will have been a meticulous inquiry in this case.
It is therefore somewhat surprising that the Health and Safety Executive should consider that military business falls within their judicial terms of reference. More fundamentally, I wonder what possible public interest there could be in rehearsing a very expensive inquiry and then failing to get a conviction (for fail they surely will for the reasons I have outlined above)? Quite what washing dirty laundry in public will do for morale is very hard to see and undermining the perceived integrity of life-saving systems in such a public way is surely not a sensible thing to do. If it is Flight Lieutenant Cunningham’s kin who are driving the prosecution, I hope they get what they want but I have to say, as one who is married to the widow of a victim of a notorious bit of flying and engineering negligence, I would have advised differently.
The court case will be expensive, time consuming and will, regardless of the result, undermine confidence in the good order and discipline of the service. It is unlikely to expose anything more of relevance that has not already been uncovered by the Inquiry.
For those of us who are dismayed (and very frightened) by the remorseless erosion of defence capability in recent years, it beggars belief that scarce human and financial resources should be diverted from our fighting posture.