Chinook - Still Hitting Back 2
Henry, I'm going to be in London for the publication of the report and then for the press conf. I'm told that the report will go straight onto the parliament website. I also understand that you will find it on most of the news sites - the press is waiting for it as much as we are.
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Hi everyone,. .I'm making enquiries as to a way of getting the report result on to PPRuNe as soon as possible after publication.
I too will be in London, but will find a way to let you all know. I can't promise, but I'll do my best!
Regards as always. .Brian. ."Justice has no expiry date" - John Cook
I too will be in London, but will find a way to let you all know. I can't promise, but I'll do my best!
Regards as always. .Brian. ."Justice has no expiry date" - John Cook
Just a numbered other
Back from holiday, hoping for news today. I'll be abroad on 5th, so any aerly posting on prune would be a bonus.
Re mrploppy's post, is it just me who gets hot under the collar with journos who keep saying that Wratten and Day 'blamed pilot error.' They did not. They found gross negligence. That is what we are fighting. A finding requiring proof beyond 'any doubt whatsoever' having been arrived at with 'no evidence whatsoever'.
Their Lordships are not daft and the burden of proof figured significantly in their questioning. I have a good feeling on this. Brian, whatever the outcome, you will feel justly proud of your campaign.
Re mrploppy's post, is it just me who gets hot under the collar with journos who keep saying that Wratten and Day 'blamed pilot error.' They did not. They found gross negligence. That is what we are fighting. A finding requiring proof beyond 'any doubt whatsoever' having been arrived at with 'no evidence whatsoever'.
Their Lordships are not daft and the burden of proof figured significantly in their questioning. I have a good feeling on this. Brian, whatever the outcome, you will feel justly proud of your campaign.
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A happy new year me old china. The way Andrew Neill has been sacking journos at The Scotsman / SoS, there's hardly anyone left there with any experience / credibility. The 'Brian Brady Westminster Editor' is probably a spotty youth who's just passed his 'O' Grade English resit at Telford College and has as much difficulty telling an adverb from an adjective, let alone Pilot Error from Gross Negligence.
A happy new year me old china. The way Andrew Neill has been sacking journos at The Scotsman / SoS, there's hardly anyone left there with any experience / credibility. The 'Brian Brady Westminster Editor' is probably a spotty youth who's just passed his 'O' Grade English resit at Telford College and has as much difficulty telling an adverb from an adjective, let alone Pilot Error from Gross Negligence.
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Scotland on Sunday 3 Feb 02
Lords set to overturn RAF ruling on Chinook
BRIAN BRADY WESTMINSTER EDITOR
A HOUSE of Lords inquiry is this week expected to overturn an RAF ruling that the "gross negligence" of Flight Lieutenants Richard Cook and Jonathan Tapper caused the Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter disaster.
But even if the five-strong Lords committee backs the RAF’s ruling, ministers will still face renewed demands for a full public inquiry into the 1994 disaster, which wiped out the elite of Northern Ireland’s anti-terrorism experts.
The move would end a long fight for justice waged by the pilots’ relatives, who bitterly accused the RAF of ignoring its own rule that dead air crew cannot be blamed unless there is absolutely no doubt that they were at fault.
Shadow defence secretary James Gray warned last night that Conservatives would join campaigners calling for a wide-ranging investigation if the Lords backed the RAF instead.
"Our strong inclination is that it is worthy of future investigation, whatever the findings reported on Tuesday," said Gray. "We need a much wider investigation than was allowed at the time or since, because we are deeply uneasy about the verdict of pilot error. It would be more likely to have been equipment failure."
Support for a review of the circumstances surrounding the crash has built up amid concerns that the two dead airmen had been "scapegoated" for the accident, in which 25 passengers and four crew died as their helicopter flew in heavy fog into the cliffs of the Mull en route from Belfast.
The government partially relented last summer when it agreed to the formation of the Lords inquiry - but only with the authority to decide whether the negligence verdicts were fair.
Lord Chalfont, chair of the all-party group which led the campaign for a Lords inquiry, said the priority for the pilots’ families was overturning the negligence verdicts. "All we are interested in at this time is getting these pilots cleared and making sure that the MoD accepts the ruling," he said.
Lords set to overturn RAF ruling on Chinook
BRIAN BRADY WESTMINSTER EDITOR
A HOUSE of Lords inquiry is this week expected to overturn an RAF ruling that the "gross negligence" of Flight Lieutenants Richard Cook and Jonathan Tapper caused the Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter disaster.
But even if the five-strong Lords committee backs the RAF’s ruling, ministers will still face renewed demands for a full public inquiry into the 1994 disaster, which wiped out the elite of Northern Ireland’s anti-terrorism experts.
The move would end a long fight for justice waged by the pilots’ relatives, who bitterly accused the RAF of ignoring its own rule that dead air crew cannot be blamed unless there is absolutely no doubt that they were at fault.
Shadow defence secretary James Gray warned last night that Conservatives would join campaigners calling for a wide-ranging investigation if the Lords backed the RAF instead.
"Our strong inclination is that it is worthy of future investigation, whatever the findings reported on Tuesday," said Gray. "We need a much wider investigation than was allowed at the time or since, because we are deeply uneasy about the verdict of pilot error. It would be more likely to have been equipment failure."
Support for a review of the circumstances surrounding the crash has built up amid concerns that the two dead airmen had been "scapegoated" for the accident, in which 25 passengers and four crew died as their helicopter flew in heavy fog into the cliffs of the Mull en route from Belfast.
The government partially relented last summer when it agreed to the formation of the Lords inquiry - but only with the authority to decide whether the negligence verdicts were fair.
Lord Chalfont, chair of the all-party group which led the campaign for a Lords inquiry, said the priority for the pilots’ families was overturning the negligence verdicts. "All we are interested in at this time is getting these pilots cleared and making sure that the MoD accepts the ruling," he said.
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The verdict
For more than seven years, the families of two pilots blamed for an RAF helicopter crash which left 29 dead have fought to clear their sons' names. This week, their battle against the military establishment reaches a climax. By John Arlidge
Sunday February 3, 2002. .The Observer
AT 7.30 on Tuesday morning, a 67-year-old former RAF and Concorde pilot will pour himself a cup of coffee, shower, put on a grey single-breasted suit, white shirt and dark blue tie, and drive the 10 miles from his Hampshire home to Fleet station to catch the 9.08 to Waterloo. . .One hundred and fifty miles away in Kings Lynn, Norfolk, a 66-year-old retired banker will get into his blue Citroen estate and drive with his wife Hazel to London.
Then, towards 11am, John Cook and Mike Tapper will walk together down the claret and gold corridors of the House of Lords past the coats of arms of the chiefs of the defence staff and head for the Office of Printed Paper just outside the debating chamber.
Their journey is the final step in an eight-year search for truth that began on the evening of 2 June 1994 when they received the telephone call from the Ministry of Defence that every serviceman's family dreads. 'I'm very sorry. I have some bad news,' the voice of the end of the line said. 'A Chinook helicopter is down on the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland. I'm afraid your...'
The two fathers knew what would come next. Their sons Rick, 30, and Jonathan, 28, were Chinook pilots. Shortly before midnight MoD officials called at the family homes to confirm the worst. Rick and Jonathan - along with everyone else on board flight Zulu Delta 576 - were dead.
The 1994 Chinook crash remains the RAF's worst peacetime accident. It killed two elite special forces pilots, two experienced crewmen, and 25 of the most senior SAS and MI5 counter-terrorist officers, including the head of Special Branch in Northern Ireland.
The accident has also become the biggest peace-time public relations headache for the Ministry of Defence.
For the past eight years the dead pilots' families, former Cabinet Ministers, MPs from all parties, Gulf war veterans, journalists and film-makers, and members of the House of Lords have accused the MoD of unfairly blaming the pilots for the crash - besmirching the reputation of men who died doing their duty.
At 11am on Tuesday, when the House of Lords Select Committee to review the Chinook crash publishes its report into the tragedy, both sides hope the truth will finally emerge. The Ministry of Defence believes its finding that the pilots were guilty of 'gross negligence' will be confirmed. The families want the Lords to clear their sons' names.
There is more than the reputation of two dead airmen at stake. If the Lords decide the MoD's verdict is wrong, it will provoke an unprecedented constitutional clash between the military and Parliament. MPs and peers will demand that the MoD publicly clears the pilots of blame and apologises to their families - something senior officers have never done before.
A cairn at the summit of the 1,400ft Beinn na Lice - 'Mountain of the stone slab'- on the southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre marks the spot where the two-rotor Chinook hit the ground at 150mph and exploded into a fireball at around 6pm on 2 June 1994.
The scene that confronted police and local doctors from Campbeltown who were first on the scene was the worst many had seen. 'It was misty but you could see burning bodies strapped into their seats. Burning, burning everywhere,' recalls local GP Geoffrey Horton.
When sun lit up the charred slopes the next morning, it was plain that the aircraft, en route from RAF Aldergrove near Belfast to a security conference near Inverness, should either have climbed or turned left away from the Kintyre peninsula into clear airspace. But it never did. Why not?
Cook and Tapper were elite special forces pilots; they were so good that they could fly helicopters backwards at night. Was it possible that the two men had simply flown through low cloud into a hill? With no survivors, no eyewitness, no 'black box' flight data recorder, no cockpit voice recorder, and no radar trace, it was clear from the start that trying to piece together what happened would be as hard as trying to reassemble the helicopter from the wreckage. And so it has proved.
There have been half a dozen separate inquiries and almost the only thing anyone can agree on is that sabotage was not to blame. The House of Lords inquiry is likely to be the final investigation. The families of the dead pilots say they will accept the peers' findings whatever they are. MoD officials say it is 'too early' to comment.
The Lords report will centre on whether the two pilots were to blame. That was the conclusion of two senior RAF officers, Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten and Air Vice Marshal John Day, who overruled the findings of the RAF's own internal inquiry which concluded in 1995 that, while it was impossible 'to determine a definite cause' there were 'no human failings'. Wratten and Day insisted the pilots had made a series of careless, navigational errors and flown too low, too fast.
Their decision to overrule the findings of the RAF's own investigators infuriated the Tappers and the Cooks, who believed the MoD had breached its own rules which stated that dead air crews should be blamed for an accident only 'if there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever'. Their fury and sense of injustice grew when the MoD refused to reopen the case after a Scottish fatal accident inquiry in 1996 publicly cleared the pilots and said the RAF investigation was 'flawed'.
The 1996 verdict prompted the two families to take the unprecedented step of taking on the military establishment. The campaign they launched six years ago and which reaches a climax on Tuesday has been one of the most remarkable in military history.
It has united former and serving military men, sceptical journalists and film-makers, technical experts, former and serving Tory Cabinet Ministers and Labour and Lib Dem peers.
Between 1996 and last year this unlikely band of investigators uncovered so much evidence casting doubt on the safety of the Chinook that they forced no fewer than three parliamentary committees to launch their own inquiries. Few subjects have been so closely examined by so many different parliamen tarians or picked over on television and in the pages of specialist magazines.
The House of Commons Defence Select Committee inquiry first leant weight to the MoD's case, concluding there were no fundamental flaws in the design of the helicopter. But later the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded there was not enough evidence to hang the reputations of the pilots. The MoD was guilty of 'unwarrantable arrogance' and the verdict of gross negligence should be overturned.
On Tuesday the Lords will have the final say. Over the past six months a five-peer committee, led by a senior judge, has gone back over every piece of evidence and interviewed the key players, including Wratten and Day. At the centre of their inquiry was fresh evidence that the computer software controlling the engines on the Chinook Mk II was unsafe.
Peers heard evidence - not presented to previous inquiries - that the engines had a terrifying habit of massively speeding up or slowing down the rotors for no reason and leaving no physical or electronic trace. On one occasion a power surge destroyed a Chinook on the ground. In another unexplained case a Chinook flipped upside down in flight before righting itself again 250ft above the ground.
Could a sudden 'engine runaway' explain why two pilots with exemplary records flew straight into the side of a hill? Were there enough question marks over safety to make a finding of gross negligence unsafe?
In a few weeks the once blackened slopes of Beinn na Lice will be covered with purple heather again. Except for the cairn, which gets a little bigger each June when visiting relatives of the dead add stones, there is no sign of the tragedy. But the marks left on the reputations of Flt Lt Rick Cook and Flt Lt John Tapper have not been erased.
The families hope the Lords report will end their fight to clear their sons' names. As Mike Tapper puts it: 'We have never said it could not be pilot error. Experienced pilots can make mistakes. But we do say there are so many doubts surrounding what happened that it is impossible to be sure. That's all we've ever asked for - all our sons would have expected of us. Is that too much?' On Tuesday they will find out.
For more than seven years, the families of two pilots blamed for an RAF helicopter crash which left 29 dead have fought to clear their sons' names. This week, their battle against the military establishment reaches a climax. By John Arlidge
Sunday February 3, 2002. .The Observer
AT 7.30 on Tuesday morning, a 67-year-old former RAF and Concorde pilot will pour himself a cup of coffee, shower, put on a grey single-breasted suit, white shirt and dark blue tie, and drive the 10 miles from his Hampshire home to Fleet station to catch the 9.08 to Waterloo. . .One hundred and fifty miles away in Kings Lynn, Norfolk, a 66-year-old retired banker will get into his blue Citroen estate and drive with his wife Hazel to London.
Then, towards 11am, John Cook and Mike Tapper will walk together down the claret and gold corridors of the House of Lords past the coats of arms of the chiefs of the defence staff and head for the Office of Printed Paper just outside the debating chamber.
Their journey is the final step in an eight-year search for truth that began on the evening of 2 June 1994 when they received the telephone call from the Ministry of Defence that every serviceman's family dreads. 'I'm very sorry. I have some bad news,' the voice of the end of the line said. 'A Chinook helicopter is down on the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland. I'm afraid your...'
The two fathers knew what would come next. Their sons Rick, 30, and Jonathan, 28, were Chinook pilots. Shortly before midnight MoD officials called at the family homes to confirm the worst. Rick and Jonathan - along with everyone else on board flight Zulu Delta 576 - were dead.
The 1994 Chinook crash remains the RAF's worst peacetime accident. It killed two elite special forces pilots, two experienced crewmen, and 25 of the most senior SAS and MI5 counter-terrorist officers, including the head of Special Branch in Northern Ireland.
The accident has also become the biggest peace-time public relations headache for the Ministry of Defence.
For the past eight years the dead pilots' families, former Cabinet Ministers, MPs from all parties, Gulf war veterans, journalists and film-makers, and members of the House of Lords have accused the MoD of unfairly blaming the pilots for the crash - besmirching the reputation of men who died doing their duty.
At 11am on Tuesday, when the House of Lords Select Committee to review the Chinook crash publishes its report into the tragedy, both sides hope the truth will finally emerge. The Ministry of Defence believes its finding that the pilots were guilty of 'gross negligence' will be confirmed. The families want the Lords to clear their sons' names.
There is more than the reputation of two dead airmen at stake. If the Lords decide the MoD's verdict is wrong, it will provoke an unprecedented constitutional clash between the military and Parliament. MPs and peers will demand that the MoD publicly clears the pilots of blame and apologises to their families - something senior officers have never done before.
A cairn at the summit of the 1,400ft Beinn na Lice - 'Mountain of the stone slab'- on the southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre marks the spot where the two-rotor Chinook hit the ground at 150mph and exploded into a fireball at around 6pm on 2 June 1994.
The scene that confronted police and local doctors from Campbeltown who were first on the scene was the worst many had seen. 'It was misty but you could see burning bodies strapped into their seats. Burning, burning everywhere,' recalls local GP Geoffrey Horton.
When sun lit up the charred slopes the next morning, it was plain that the aircraft, en route from RAF Aldergrove near Belfast to a security conference near Inverness, should either have climbed or turned left away from the Kintyre peninsula into clear airspace. But it never did. Why not?
Cook and Tapper were elite special forces pilots; they were so good that they could fly helicopters backwards at night. Was it possible that the two men had simply flown through low cloud into a hill? With no survivors, no eyewitness, no 'black box' flight data recorder, no cockpit voice recorder, and no radar trace, it was clear from the start that trying to piece together what happened would be as hard as trying to reassemble the helicopter from the wreckage. And so it has proved.
There have been half a dozen separate inquiries and almost the only thing anyone can agree on is that sabotage was not to blame. The House of Lords inquiry is likely to be the final investigation. The families of the dead pilots say they will accept the peers' findings whatever they are. MoD officials say it is 'too early' to comment.
The Lords report will centre on whether the two pilots were to blame. That was the conclusion of two senior RAF officers, Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten and Air Vice Marshal John Day, who overruled the findings of the RAF's own internal inquiry which concluded in 1995 that, while it was impossible 'to determine a definite cause' there were 'no human failings'. Wratten and Day insisted the pilots had made a series of careless, navigational errors and flown too low, too fast.
Their decision to overrule the findings of the RAF's own investigators infuriated the Tappers and the Cooks, who believed the MoD had breached its own rules which stated that dead air crews should be blamed for an accident only 'if there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever'. Their fury and sense of injustice grew when the MoD refused to reopen the case after a Scottish fatal accident inquiry in 1996 publicly cleared the pilots and said the RAF investigation was 'flawed'.
The 1996 verdict prompted the two families to take the unprecedented step of taking on the military establishment. The campaign they launched six years ago and which reaches a climax on Tuesday has been one of the most remarkable in military history.
It has united former and serving military men, sceptical journalists and film-makers, technical experts, former and serving Tory Cabinet Ministers and Labour and Lib Dem peers.
Between 1996 and last year this unlikely band of investigators uncovered so much evidence casting doubt on the safety of the Chinook that they forced no fewer than three parliamentary committees to launch their own inquiries. Few subjects have been so closely examined by so many different parliamen tarians or picked over on television and in the pages of specialist magazines.
The House of Commons Defence Select Committee inquiry first leant weight to the MoD's case, concluding there were no fundamental flaws in the design of the helicopter. But later the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded there was not enough evidence to hang the reputations of the pilots. The MoD was guilty of 'unwarrantable arrogance' and the verdict of gross negligence should be overturned.
On Tuesday the Lords will have the final say. Over the past six months a five-peer committee, led by a senior judge, has gone back over every piece of evidence and interviewed the key players, including Wratten and Day. At the centre of their inquiry was fresh evidence that the computer software controlling the engines on the Chinook Mk II was unsafe.
Peers heard evidence - not presented to previous inquiries - that the engines had a terrifying habit of massively speeding up or slowing down the rotors for no reason and leaving no physical or electronic trace. On one occasion a power surge destroyed a Chinook on the ground. In another unexplained case a Chinook flipped upside down in flight before righting itself again 250ft above the ground.
Could a sudden 'engine runaway' explain why two pilots with exemplary records flew straight into the side of a hill? Were there enough question marks over safety to make a finding of gross negligence unsafe?
In a few weeks the once blackened slopes of Beinn na Lice will be covered with purple heather again. Except for the cairn, which gets a little bigger each June when visiting relatives of the dead add stones, there is no sign of the tragedy. But the marks left on the reputations of Flt Lt Rick Cook and Flt Lt John Tapper have not been erased.
The families hope the Lords report will end their fight to clear their sons' names. As Mike Tapper puts it: 'We have never said it could not be pilot error. Experienced pilots can make mistakes. But we do say there are so many doubts surrounding what happened that it is impossible to be sure. That's all we've ever asked for - all our sons would have expected of us. Is that too much?' On Tuesday they will find out.
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When you read the above, it raises many passions. Not least of which is the need to get the monkey off the back of John and Rick's parents. It must be terrible burden.
There are other passions too. Their Lordships deliberations, which if you attended the hearing, showed just how seriously they took the task they were charged with.
Personal passions came through, as this thread reveals if you care to look, or on the other Chinook thread too, where the original passions ran high.
It is truly remarkable that so many people have, in their own way, made their opinions known. Some who no doubt are currently in senior positions in the services. All recognising a "stitch up" when they saw one.
My personal passion, well two really, is that the findings will overturn the MoD's wilful act of negligence in conducting an enquiry in such an arrogant and unprofessional manner. Then, and this is my abiding passion, that both Wratten and Day, who we hope will be shown to have disgraced themselves - not to mention the good name of the Royal Air Force. Will also be shown not worthy to hold the office that they were, and are enstrusted with. They were duty bound to hold and protect that office, and to be seen to conduct themselves fairly and at all times hold safe the glory of the Royal Air Force.
Wratten's outrageous display of arrogance, and Day's willingness to support him, casting aside "reasonable doubt", serves only to show that they are unworthy to hold office. Before Day resigns, for that is what he must do if their findings are overturned, they should then both offer their profound apologies to the families. If the families choose to reject such an offer, can they really expect more.
Finally, perhaps the most important passion shown here is the dedication and commitment, by a handful of good men and women, who have striven hard and long to see justice done. They deserve this hoped for verdict, probably as much as the parents do - certainly as much as John and Rick do.
There are other passions too. Their Lordships deliberations, which if you attended the hearing, showed just how seriously they took the task they were charged with.
Personal passions came through, as this thread reveals if you care to look, or on the other Chinook thread too, where the original passions ran high.
It is truly remarkable that so many people have, in their own way, made their opinions known. Some who no doubt are currently in senior positions in the services. All recognising a "stitch up" when they saw one.
My personal passion, well two really, is that the findings will overturn the MoD's wilful act of negligence in conducting an enquiry in such an arrogant and unprofessional manner. Then, and this is my abiding passion, that both Wratten and Day, who we hope will be shown to have disgraced themselves - not to mention the good name of the Royal Air Force. Will also be shown not worthy to hold the office that they were, and are enstrusted with. They were duty bound to hold and protect that office, and to be seen to conduct themselves fairly and at all times hold safe the glory of the Royal Air Force.
Wratten's outrageous display of arrogance, and Day's willingness to support him, casting aside "reasonable doubt", serves only to show that they are unworthy to hold office. Before Day resigns, for that is what he must do if their findings are overturned, they should then both offer their profound apologies to the families. If the families choose to reject such an offer, can they really expect more.
Finally, perhaps the most important passion shown here is the dedication and commitment, by a handful of good men and women, who have striven hard and long to see justice done. They deserve this hoped for verdict, probably as much as the parents do - certainly as much as John and Rick do.
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Thank you very much to everybody for their kind comments (and for the press articles too Mr P). I just hope that the families get the result they rightfully deserve. Jon and Rick too!
We'll all find out in less that 48 hours. Nervous? Me? N..n..no
Regards as always. .Brian. ."Justice has no expiry date" - John Cook
We'll all find out in less that 48 hours. Nervous? Me? N..n..no
Regards as always. .Brian. ."Justice has no expiry date" - John Cook
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One of the better pieces on the case that I have read from journoland, a 2-page spread c/w photos and graphics in today's Herald. Sorry, I don't have the technology for the graphics and couldn't find the piece in their online edition at <a href="http://www.sundayherald.com" target="_blank">www.sundayherald.com</a> .
Sunday Herald 3 Feb 02 Print Edition. 2 Articles, pp 12 & 13.
Seven years on, will the Chinook pilots finally be cleared?
As the Lords prepare to reveal their findings on 1994's fatal Mull of Kintyre crash, Torcuil Crichton examines a long fight for justice.
Catch up: When an RAF Chinook Helicopter crashed over the Mull of Kintyre in 1994, 29 people died including 25 senior intelligence officers. The latest of a long string of inquiries into the tragedy will report this week. Families of some of those who died hope it will finally clear the two pilots of blame and reveal the true cause of the crash.
The crew logbook of the Royal Navy Sea King scrambled from Prestwick captures, as well as anything, the sequence of events on the Mull of Kintyre on the evening of June 2, 1994.
“What a horrible one. Scrambled at 1810 (local), airborne 1817 with basic details of a helicopter being heard flying over Mull of Kintyre lighthouse followed shortly by a loud bang. Heard on route that it was a Chinook – thought initially 5 or so souls on board [later confirmed at 29] so ensured that other units (including our standby crew) were also scrambled. Arrived on scene approximately 1845 … Closed accident scene from the south of the Mull, found 4 or 5 lines of fire in the heather on the hillside but cloud and smoke prohibited any cliff transit to the crash site. Landed at landing pad near lighthouse to assist with casevac [casualty evacuation] if required (we weren’t!)…”
Twenty-nine people, including 25 of Britain’s top intelligence officers in Northern Ireland, were killed when Chinook ZD576, en route from Northern Ireland to Scotland, crashed into the Mull of Kintyre in the RAF’s worst peacetime accident. But instead of becoming another tragedy remembered only by grieving families and friends on each anniversary, the Mull of Kintyre crash has turned into a cause célèbre, a fight to clear the names of the pilots who were blamed amid claims of a technological scandal and cover-up.
In seven years the case has also acquired a symbolic status. It is seen as a struggle for truth against an intractable British military establishment that cannot admit, in the face of mounting evidence, that two of its senior officers may have gone too far in finding the helicopter’s pilots grossly negligent.
There have been at least six enquiries into the circumstances of the crash – ranging from the Scottish fatal accident enquiry to a Royal Aeronautical Society enquiry – but the truth is that nobody will ever know for sure why Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper, who was 28, and Richard Cook, 30, flew into the hillside in the mist on that Thursday evening.
What their families want to establish is not the exact cause of the but that there was not enough evidence to damn the reputations of their sons The latest and final inquiry, a house of Lords select committee investigation, will reveal its findings this Tuesday. For five months now the committee - led by Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, a former Scottish law lord, and also comprising three QCs and an engineer - has gathered evidence, listened to witnesses and mulled over their opinions.
The last person to see the Chinook in fight on that evening was an amateur yachtsman who was at sea off the Mull of Kintyre. He saw the helicopter flying below cloud in straight, level flight about 200-300 ft above sea level, The top of the Mull was shrouded in cloud, but the crew had not planned to fly over it in any case.
Flight Lieutenant Tapper indicated on the navigation computer that the first waypoint, a lighthouse on the tip of Kintyre, had been reached, and entered a second waypoint, Corran, which was about 90 miles away. That required a turn to the left which would allow the Mk2 Chinook to fly around the Mull. But for whatever reason the manoeuvre was never executed and ZD576 crashed into the hillside, broke up in flames and bounced along the moor in pieces.
A civilian fatal accident inquiry and an RAF board of inquiry followed. Neither concluded by blaming the pilots. The RAF thought human error was “likely" but also that a "major technical malfunction could not be ruled out".. .But the RAF then overturned its own conclusion.
Two senior officers, Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten and Air Marshal Sir John Day, reviewed the board of inquiry and found Flight Lieutenants Tapper and Cook posthumously guilt of gross negligence - the equivalent of manslaughter. They had flown too low and too fast approaching the foggy Mull of Kintyre. No question, no doubt.
On top of the grief of losing their sons, the accusation was a devastating blow for the pilots' families. They immediately began to campaign to have the ruling overturned. After seven years they and their supporters sense they are about to score a victory against the MoD - but they exercise caution.
Far away from Westminster, far away from the Mull of Kintyre, Mike Tapper has been waiting a long time. The retired bank manager from Norfolk who lost his son in the Chinook crash is sure that the marathon campaign will not be over with Tuesday’s report, whatever verdict it might contain. To sustain him he has only bitter experience.
"We've been through the fatal accident inquiry, we've been through the Channel Four inquiry and then the totally unsatisfactory House of Commons select committee, who just accepted everything the MoD told them," he says. "We've had the public accounts committee and now the Lords inquiry what I’m saying is that we have been here before."
Last week Lord Chalfont circulated a memo to all members of the parliamentary Mull of Kintyre group, which cajoled and campaigned for the Lords inquiry warning them that the outcome may not go in their favour. Lord Chalfont, a former military intelligence officer and minister of state, is the driving force behind the group and has already said he will accept the inquiry's verdict as the final outcome.
"Either we will succeed or the air marshals will be vindicated, but it is such an obvious miscarriage of justice that I think the report will have an enormous impact on the MoD," says Lord Chalfont. "If the Lords find there is too much doubt to condemn the men I can’t see how anyone, even the Prime Minister could refuse to take action,"
The doubts over the verdict centre primarily on safety fears over the Mk 2 Chinook among RAF pilots. It was seriously unreliable in its first months of operational service, and the belief among the men who flew it is that it was rushed into service.
The Mk 2 Chinook's engines were fitted with FADEC (full authority digital electronic control) software, which controls fuel flow to the front and rear engines and therefore also controls the power output. The computer system was plagued with glitches. A year before the crash MoD experts at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire, the RAF's official test site, refused to recommend the Chinooks carrying the new system. But the MoD, down to half-strength in its Chinook fleet, pressed on, and the system was introduced the following year.
The pilots at RAF Boscombe Down had on two occasions - including the day before the crash - refused to fly Chinooks fitted with FADEC. The RAF maintains that these refusals were unconnected to the system itself.
Flight Lieutenants Cook and Tapper both told their parents they were worried about the safety of the Chinooks, Cook asking his father, a former Concorde pilot, on three separate occasions to look after his family.
"'You will look after Sarah and Eleanor?' That was his wife and daughter," recalls Cook senior "On the last occasion I said, 'Come on, Rick, what is it?' He said, 'Dad, the aircraft is not ready and we are not ready. We have had too little time to sort it out.' Three or four days later he was killed."
In Brighton, in a corner of Tony Collins's home office, are three suitcases full of evidence on the Mull of Kintyre crash and FADEC software. Collins, a journalist with the unglamorous trade magazine Computer Weekly, is the Bob Woodward of the Chinook campaign - the hack who was handed a pile of software readouts to analyse and who uncovered a scandal.
In 1997, three years after the crash, Channel Four News approached Computer Weekly with a copy of an independent assessment of the FADEC computer system that the MoD had commissioned. Collins analysed it, expecting to find perhaps five or six inevitable glitches recorded. In the event there were 486 anomalies in the software.. ."I was astonished that it related to a helicopter that was in service. This wasn't a banking system or a newspaper computer, this was safety-critical software," says Collins.
"The first thing I did was seek out the MoD's case and find out why they had found the pilots negligent, I put myself in their shoes because I couldn't get involved in a campaign if there was strong evidence against the pilots. I was surprised by the lack of evidence. There was more and more evidence of problems with the software emerging and scant evidence to back their case.”. .Investigations uncovered that, while the MoD maintained that FADEC did not compromise the safety of ZD576, it was at the same time suing the makers of the system after a near-fatal crash in 1989 - a fact it withheld from the Air Accident Investigation Board. The MoD did not inform the air accident investigators of the case, according to armed forces minister John Reid, because "we sued them for negligence in their testing procedure. We did not sue them because of a failure in FADEC."
In fact, material obtained by Computer Weekly reveals that the MoD's case against the manufacturers, Textron Lycoming, was almost entirely based on the alleged faulty design of Fadec.
Collins's findings and the subsequent publicity garnered by Channel Four re-ignited the Chinook campaign and propelled it into the Commons. The magazine published Rough Justice, a 160-page on-line report into the Chinook crash, and more than 90 MPs signed a motion calling for a new inquiry. The Ministry of Defence issued a rebuttal of the report two hours before it was published.. .That changed things for Collins. “From then on the campaign was really fuelled by the MoD making lots of factually incorrect statements. When we wrote Rough Justice we thought they would see good grounds for a new inquiry, but after that we realised they had a fixed position no matter what new evidence came to light."
It was Collins's first expeflence ot the military's “sanctity of command” - the unwritten principle that does not allow the MoD to overturn the decision of senior officers, regardless of subsequent information For Collins this is now the issue at the heart of the campaign. He has not been the only person to encounter it.. .Computer Weekly's findings and the Channel 4 campaign drew the attention of the House of Commons public accounts committee, which accused the MoD of 'unwarrantable arrogance' in dismissing its voluminous report and year-long investigation.
Another Commons committee, the defence select committee, had gone along with the MoD's findings, though some opposition members, notably Lib Dem Menzies Campbell, accused the government of putting pressure on Labour members to accept the MoD line. By then Malcolm Rifkind - a defence minister at the time of the crash, who had told parliament that the men were grossly negligent - had changed his mind after reading the evidence of FADEC failure. He became an influential supporter of the campaign. A former minister was now accusing the Whitehall mandarins and the military of getting it wrong on the Mull of Kintyre crash.
In Whitehall they are waiting too. In theory the Ministry of Defence could simply ignore the findings of the Lords inquiry. Its outcome will not overturn the findings of the two senior officers but defence officials know it would be obtuse to dismiss it as it did the public accounts committee.
"Their lordships have taken this very seriously and we will be taking cognisance of what they say," said an MoD official who has monitored the evidence and the proceedings of the inquiry. "Legally, technically, we could say that it doesn't matter a jot, but we won't be putting ourselves in that position."
Why the MoD has proved so resistant to pressure has baffled those outside the case. But one encounter with Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten - OBE, CE, AFC (retired) - soon dispels any confusion. In public statements, on television, in the committee room giving evidence to the Lords inquiry, Sir William has never displayed a scintilla of doubt over his decision. He is of a completely unbending military mindset that simply will not contemplate, once a decision has been made, that it could possibly be mistaken, far less overturned.
His colleague, Air Marshal Sir John Day, still serving in the RAF, told the inquiry that finding the pilots guilty had been the most difficult decision of his life. It had, he recalled, required "moral courage” the kind of mettle he displayed when, in front of the pilots' parents, he said that there was no doubt Tapper and Cook had "breached all the safety rules".. .Tapper and Cook were trained to break all the safety rules. They were both special forces pilots, an elite who knew how to fly low, fast and in the dark, They could hide helicopters behind hedgerows and pick out rainfall glinting off an electricity line before they flew into it. Is it possible, with such a precious cargo aboard, that they blew it and simply flew into the hillside?
Their lordships are keeping their opinion close to their chests. The words of one expert witness, Squadron-Leader Robert Burke, an acknowledged authority on the Chinook, started a rumour that the Lords were wavering towards the view that the crash was due to a technical error. Burke himself thinks they wanted to hear more because the MoD had submitted extra information on technical aspects of the aircraft after the deadline for evidence had passed, which in turn indicated that the military were rattled by the inquiry. Or so the Westminster rumour mill went.. .The families are now bracing themselves for a result, as convinced of their cause as the air chief marshal is of his. Their campaign slogan is that justice has no expiry date - but they have waited a long time. "You get used to hunkering down and not using too much energy in times like . .these," says Mike Tapper.
SECOND ARTICLE
This is not the first case in which the official military line has been called into question. Diplomatic Editor Trevor Royle looks back at the MoD’s dishonourable history of smears and deceit.
Like any other large organisation with thousands of employees, the Ministry of Defence is not without its share of inertia, back-stabbing, inefficiency and cover-ups. Vast sums are spent on equipment that sometimes fails to work. Budgets are allowed to rocket and political interference can lead to complications as civil servants and ministers take precedence over service personnel.
As one insider puts it. there is a tendency for the whole organisation to be overcome by "a heavy element of bureaucratic inertia". cock-up is common, he insists - but conspiracy is rare.. .Inter-service rivalry also abounds. It is not uncommon for senior officers to push the claims of their own services, even if efficiency is impaired, and in the army this can extend to unhealthy competitiveness between regiments and corps. In the spring of 1982 the colonels of the Welsh and Scots Guards lobbied hard for their regiments to be included in the task force to retake the Falkands, even though many military critics thought they were not “match fit" for winter warfare. At the same time the claims of the Queen's Own Highlanders, the regiment on standby for service overseas, were ignored.. .But because the work of the MoD concerns national security - the passengers on the RAF Chinook that crashed near the Mull of Kintyre in 1994 were drawn from the intelligence community in Northern Ireland - any suspected breach sends senior officers into overdrive. With a determination which is understandable, steps are taken to correct the problem and limit the damage, but this need to plug gaps can create further difficulties. "Once you get into security matters, common sense gets suspended," says the same source, who is familiar with cases similar to the Chinook inquiry, “People get excited because they’re into a secret and want to keep it to themselves. Conspiracy theories abound and it gets difficult to see the wood for the trees."
The recent case involving Nigel Wylde, a retired lieutenant-colonel, is frequently cited as an example of the MoD getting into all sorts of trouble because it starts something it cannot stop. Wylde was arrested in 1998 on five charges of leaking confidential information about military computer systems to the author Tony Gerrachty. Both men were seized simultaneously early in the morning by MoD police. Their papers and computers were confiscated and, although they were released on bail, their telephones were tapped and they had to endure constant surveillance.
The charges against the two men were absurd - information was freely available I about the Vengeful and Crucible computer surveillance Systems mentioned by Geraghty in his book The Irish War - but even though the MOD police appeared to have little or no evidence with which they could support the charge against the men under the 1989 Official Secrets Act, the case was pursued with relentless ferocity.
Eventually both cases were dropped, first Geraghty's and then - grudgingly - Wylde's, but not before both men had suffered financial loss and numerous indignities.
During the proceedings it became clear that Wylde had made enemies in the intelligence community, and there were suggestions that he was the target of senior officers who bore a grudge. In 1997, the year before he was arrested, he had led a team from a private computer company which investigated the army's computer-based communication and information systems in Northern Ireland - and its findings were damning. The system was labelled "a disgrace”; a finding which was not calculated to make Wylde the most popular retired soldier in the eyes of the top brass.
Inevitably, not all the case's facts are known - the MoD produced public interest immunity certificates to prevent their release. For future investigators, the probable outcome is that they will be airbrushed out of history.
That is what happened when two RAF Lincoln bombers strayed over the East German border in March 1953 and one was shot down by patrolling MIG 15 fighters. All seven crew were killed, four in the crash and three when their parachutes unaccountably failed to open.
The RAF insisted that the Lincolns were unarmed and had simply made a navigational error, but at the time was widely assumed that they had been on a spying mission - a suspicion that was nourished when ammunition was found at the wreck site.
Later, the crashed Lincoln disappeared - in more ways than one. Every RAF aircraft has an official photograph, but not this one. Equally conveniently, the relevant pages from the records regarding the incident have been lost.
In the worst cases, history can be rewritten to put the writers in a better light and denigrate those unable to defend themselves. The most notorious example was the decision taken by senior officers to blacken the name of Major-General Orde Wingate, the commander of the Chindit forces in Burma, when the official history of the second world war was written in the 1950s. Wingate was a brilliant soldier but a difficult man whose rudeness was famous and whose temper was legendary.
While raising his forces, who fought behind Japanese lines in Burma in 1943 and 1944, Wingate had made many enemies among senior officers in India. After he was killed in a plane crash in March 1944 they took their revenge. The official history was supposed to be an accurate and disinterested record of all operations in the second world war, but the leading author of the Burma volume, Major-General S Woodburn Kirby, redrafted the facts to put the Chindits and Wingate in a bad light and belittle their achievements. Kirby had been director of staff duties in Delhi and had clashed with Wingate: it was assumed he was biased, but nothing could be proved.
When Major-General Derek Tulloch, Wingate's second-in-command protested, he was threatened with arrest and imprisonment in the Tower of London. It was some 40 years before the true facts about the biased writing of the Burma volume of the official history were unearthed and published.
Trevor Royle is the author of Orde Wingate: Irregular Soldier (Phoenix, £14.99).
Sunday Herald 3 Feb 02 Print Edition. 2 Articles, pp 12 & 13.
Seven years on, will the Chinook pilots finally be cleared?
As the Lords prepare to reveal their findings on 1994's fatal Mull of Kintyre crash, Torcuil Crichton examines a long fight for justice.
Catch up: When an RAF Chinook Helicopter crashed over the Mull of Kintyre in 1994, 29 people died including 25 senior intelligence officers. The latest of a long string of inquiries into the tragedy will report this week. Families of some of those who died hope it will finally clear the two pilots of blame and reveal the true cause of the crash.
The crew logbook of the Royal Navy Sea King scrambled from Prestwick captures, as well as anything, the sequence of events on the Mull of Kintyre on the evening of June 2, 1994.
“What a horrible one. Scrambled at 1810 (local), airborne 1817 with basic details of a helicopter being heard flying over Mull of Kintyre lighthouse followed shortly by a loud bang. Heard on route that it was a Chinook – thought initially 5 or so souls on board [later confirmed at 29] so ensured that other units (including our standby crew) were also scrambled. Arrived on scene approximately 1845 … Closed accident scene from the south of the Mull, found 4 or 5 lines of fire in the heather on the hillside but cloud and smoke prohibited any cliff transit to the crash site. Landed at landing pad near lighthouse to assist with casevac [casualty evacuation] if required (we weren’t!)…”
Twenty-nine people, including 25 of Britain’s top intelligence officers in Northern Ireland, were killed when Chinook ZD576, en route from Northern Ireland to Scotland, crashed into the Mull of Kintyre in the RAF’s worst peacetime accident. But instead of becoming another tragedy remembered only by grieving families and friends on each anniversary, the Mull of Kintyre crash has turned into a cause célèbre, a fight to clear the names of the pilots who were blamed amid claims of a technological scandal and cover-up.
In seven years the case has also acquired a symbolic status. It is seen as a struggle for truth against an intractable British military establishment that cannot admit, in the face of mounting evidence, that two of its senior officers may have gone too far in finding the helicopter’s pilots grossly negligent.
There have been at least six enquiries into the circumstances of the crash – ranging from the Scottish fatal accident enquiry to a Royal Aeronautical Society enquiry – but the truth is that nobody will ever know for sure why Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper, who was 28, and Richard Cook, 30, flew into the hillside in the mist on that Thursday evening.
What their families want to establish is not the exact cause of the but that there was not enough evidence to damn the reputations of their sons The latest and final inquiry, a house of Lords select committee investigation, will reveal its findings this Tuesday. For five months now the committee - led by Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, a former Scottish law lord, and also comprising three QCs and an engineer - has gathered evidence, listened to witnesses and mulled over their opinions.
The last person to see the Chinook in fight on that evening was an amateur yachtsman who was at sea off the Mull of Kintyre. He saw the helicopter flying below cloud in straight, level flight about 200-300 ft above sea level, The top of the Mull was shrouded in cloud, but the crew had not planned to fly over it in any case.
Flight Lieutenant Tapper indicated on the navigation computer that the first waypoint, a lighthouse on the tip of Kintyre, had been reached, and entered a second waypoint, Corran, which was about 90 miles away. That required a turn to the left which would allow the Mk2 Chinook to fly around the Mull. But for whatever reason the manoeuvre was never executed and ZD576 crashed into the hillside, broke up in flames and bounced along the moor in pieces.
A civilian fatal accident inquiry and an RAF board of inquiry followed. Neither concluded by blaming the pilots. The RAF thought human error was “likely" but also that a "major technical malfunction could not be ruled out".. .But the RAF then overturned its own conclusion.
Two senior officers, Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten and Air Marshal Sir John Day, reviewed the board of inquiry and found Flight Lieutenants Tapper and Cook posthumously guilt of gross negligence - the equivalent of manslaughter. They had flown too low and too fast approaching the foggy Mull of Kintyre. No question, no doubt.
On top of the grief of losing their sons, the accusation was a devastating blow for the pilots' families. They immediately began to campaign to have the ruling overturned. After seven years they and their supporters sense they are about to score a victory against the MoD - but they exercise caution.
Far away from Westminster, far away from the Mull of Kintyre, Mike Tapper has been waiting a long time. The retired bank manager from Norfolk who lost his son in the Chinook crash is sure that the marathon campaign will not be over with Tuesday’s report, whatever verdict it might contain. To sustain him he has only bitter experience.
"We've been through the fatal accident inquiry, we've been through the Channel Four inquiry and then the totally unsatisfactory House of Commons select committee, who just accepted everything the MoD told them," he says. "We've had the public accounts committee and now the Lords inquiry what I’m saying is that we have been here before."
Last week Lord Chalfont circulated a memo to all members of the parliamentary Mull of Kintyre group, which cajoled and campaigned for the Lords inquiry warning them that the outcome may not go in their favour. Lord Chalfont, a former military intelligence officer and minister of state, is the driving force behind the group and has already said he will accept the inquiry's verdict as the final outcome.
"Either we will succeed or the air marshals will be vindicated, but it is such an obvious miscarriage of justice that I think the report will have an enormous impact on the MoD," says Lord Chalfont. "If the Lords find there is too much doubt to condemn the men I can’t see how anyone, even the Prime Minister could refuse to take action,"
The doubts over the verdict centre primarily on safety fears over the Mk 2 Chinook among RAF pilots. It was seriously unreliable in its first months of operational service, and the belief among the men who flew it is that it was rushed into service.
The Mk 2 Chinook's engines were fitted with FADEC (full authority digital electronic control) software, which controls fuel flow to the front and rear engines and therefore also controls the power output. The computer system was plagued with glitches. A year before the crash MoD experts at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire, the RAF's official test site, refused to recommend the Chinooks carrying the new system. But the MoD, down to half-strength in its Chinook fleet, pressed on, and the system was introduced the following year.
The pilots at RAF Boscombe Down had on two occasions - including the day before the crash - refused to fly Chinooks fitted with FADEC. The RAF maintains that these refusals were unconnected to the system itself.
Flight Lieutenants Cook and Tapper both told their parents they were worried about the safety of the Chinooks, Cook asking his father, a former Concorde pilot, on three separate occasions to look after his family.
"'You will look after Sarah and Eleanor?' That was his wife and daughter," recalls Cook senior "On the last occasion I said, 'Come on, Rick, what is it?' He said, 'Dad, the aircraft is not ready and we are not ready. We have had too little time to sort it out.' Three or four days later he was killed."
In Brighton, in a corner of Tony Collins's home office, are three suitcases full of evidence on the Mull of Kintyre crash and FADEC software. Collins, a journalist with the unglamorous trade magazine Computer Weekly, is the Bob Woodward of the Chinook campaign - the hack who was handed a pile of software readouts to analyse and who uncovered a scandal.
In 1997, three years after the crash, Channel Four News approached Computer Weekly with a copy of an independent assessment of the FADEC computer system that the MoD had commissioned. Collins analysed it, expecting to find perhaps five or six inevitable glitches recorded. In the event there were 486 anomalies in the software.. ."I was astonished that it related to a helicopter that was in service. This wasn't a banking system or a newspaper computer, this was safety-critical software," says Collins.
"The first thing I did was seek out the MoD's case and find out why they had found the pilots negligent, I put myself in their shoes because I couldn't get involved in a campaign if there was strong evidence against the pilots. I was surprised by the lack of evidence. There was more and more evidence of problems with the software emerging and scant evidence to back their case.”. .Investigations uncovered that, while the MoD maintained that FADEC did not compromise the safety of ZD576, it was at the same time suing the makers of the system after a near-fatal crash in 1989 - a fact it withheld from the Air Accident Investigation Board. The MoD did not inform the air accident investigators of the case, according to armed forces minister John Reid, because "we sued them for negligence in their testing procedure. We did not sue them because of a failure in FADEC."
In fact, material obtained by Computer Weekly reveals that the MoD's case against the manufacturers, Textron Lycoming, was almost entirely based on the alleged faulty design of Fadec.
Collins's findings and the subsequent publicity garnered by Channel Four re-ignited the Chinook campaign and propelled it into the Commons. The magazine published Rough Justice, a 160-page on-line report into the Chinook crash, and more than 90 MPs signed a motion calling for a new inquiry. The Ministry of Defence issued a rebuttal of the report two hours before it was published.. .That changed things for Collins. “From then on the campaign was really fuelled by the MoD making lots of factually incorrect statements. When we wrote Rough Justice we thought they would see good grounds for a new inquiry, but after that we realised they had a fixed position no matter what new evidence came to light."
It was Collins's first expeflence ot the military's “sanctity of command” - the unwritten principle that does not allow the MoD to overturn the decision of senior officers, regardless of subsequent information For Collins this is now the issue at the heart of the campaign. He has not been the only person to encounter it.. .Computer Weekly's findings and the Channel 4 campaign drew the attention of the House of Commons public accounts committee, which accused the MoD of 'unwarrantable arrogance' in dismissing its voluminous report and year-long investigation.
Another Commons committee, the defence select committee, had gone along with the MoD's findings, though some opposition members, notably Lib Dem Menzies Campbell, accused the government of putting pressure on Labour members to accept the MoD line. By then Malcolm Rifkind - a defence minister at the time of the crash, who had told parliament that the men were grossly negligent - had changed his mind after reading the evidence of FADEC failure. He became an influential supporter of the campaign. A former minister was now accusing the Whitehall mandarins and the military of getting it wrong on the Mull of Kintyre crash.
In Whitehall they are waiting too. In theory the Ministry of Defence could simply ignore the findings of the Lords inquiry. Its outcome will not overturn the findings of the two senior officers but defence officials know it would be obtuse to dismiss it as it did the public accounts committee.
"Their lordships have taken this very seriously and we will be taking cognisance of what they say," said an MoD official who has monitored the evidence and the proceedings of the inquiry. "Legally, technically, we could say that it doesn't matter a jot, but we won't be putting ourselves in that position."
Why the MoD has proved so resistant to pressure has baffled those outside the case. But one encounter with Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten - OBE, CE, AFC (retired) - soon dispels any confusion. In public statements, on television, in the committee room giving evidence to the Lords inquiry, Sir William has never displayed a scintilla of doubt over his decision. He is of a completely unbending military mindset that simply will not contemplate, once a decision has been made, that it could possibly be mistaken, far less overturned.
His colleague, Air Marshal Sir John Day, still serving in the RAF, told the inquiry that finding the pilots guilty had been the most difficult decision of his life. It had, he recalled, required "moral courage” the kind of mettle he displayed when, in front of the pilots' parents, he said that there was no doubt Tapper and Cook had "breached all the safety rules".. .Tapper and Cook were trained to break all the safety rules. They were both special forces pilots, an elite who knew how to fly low, fast and in the dark, They could hide helicopters behind hedgerows and pick out rainfall glinting off an electricity line before they flew into it. Is it possible, with such a precious cargo aboard, that they blew it and simply flew into the hillside?
Their lordships are keeping their opinion close to their chests. The words of one expert witness, Squadron-Leader Robert Burke, an acknowledged authority on the Chinook, started a rumour that the Lords were wavering towards the view that the crash was due to a technical error. Burke himself thinks they wanted to hear more because the MoD had submitted extra information on technical aspects of the aircraft after the deadline for evidence had passed, which in turn indicated that the military were rattled by the inquiry. Or so the Westminster rumour mill went.. .The families are now bracing themselves for a result, as convinced of their cause as the air chief marshal is of his. Their campaign slogan is that justice has no expiry date - but they have waited a long time. "You get used to hunkering down and not using too much energy in times like . .these," says Mike Tapper.
SECOND ARTICLE
This is not the first case in which the official military line has been called into question. Diplomatic Editor Trevor Royle looks back at the MoD’s dishonourable history of smears and deceit.
Like any other large organisation with thousands of employees, the Ministry of Defence is not without its share of inertia, back-stabbing, inefficiency and cover-ups. Vast sums are spent on equipment that sometimes fails to work. Budgets are allowed to rocket and political interference can lead to complications as civil servants and ministers take precedence over service personnel.
As one insider puts it. there is a tendency for the whole organisation to be overcome by "a heavy element of bureaucratic inertia". cock-up is common, he insists - but conspiracy is rare.. .Inter-service rivalry also abounds. It is not uncommon for senior officers to push the claims of their own services, even if efficiency is impaired, and in the army this can extend to unhealthy competitiveness between regiments and corps. In the spring of 1982 the colonels of the Welsh and Scots Guards lobbied hard for their regiments to be included in the task force to retake the Falkands, even though many military critics thought they were not “match fit" for winter warfare. At the same time the claims of the Queen's Own Highlanders, the regiment on standby for service overseas, were ignored.. .But because the work of the MoD concerns national security - the passengers on the RAF Chinook that crashed near the Mull of Kintyre in 1994 were drawn from the intelligence community in Northern Ireland - any suspected breach sends senior officers into overdrive. With a determination which is understandable, steps are taken to correct the problem and limit the damage, but this need to plug gaps can create further difficulties. "Once you get into security matters, common sense gets suspended," says the same source, who is familiar with cases similar to the Chinook inquiry, “People get excited because they’re into a secret and want to keep it to themselves. Conspiracy theories abound and it gets difficult to see the wood for the trees."
The recent case involving Nigel Wylde, a retired lieutenant-colonel, is frequently cited as an example of the MoD getting into all sorts of trouble because it starts something it cannot stop. Wylde was arrested in 1998 on five charges of leaking confidential information about military computer systems to the author Tony Gerrachty. Both men were seized simultaneously early in the morning by MoD police. Their papers and computers were confiscated and, although they were released on bail, their telephones were tapped and they had to endure constant surveillance.
The charges against the two men were absurd - information was freely available I about the Vengeful and Crucible computer surveillance Systems mentioned by Geraghty in his book The Irish War - but even though the MOD police appeared to have little or no evidence with which they could support the charge against the men under the 1989 Official Secrets Act, the case was pursued with relentless ferocity.
Eventually both cases were dropped, first Geraghty's and then - grudgingly - Wylde's, but not before both men had suffered financial loss and numerous indignities.
During the proceedings it became clear that Wylde had made enemies in the intelligence community, and there were suggestions that he was the target of senior officers who bore a grudge. In 1997, the year before he was arrested, he had led a team from a private computer company which investigated the army's computer-based communication and information systems in Northern Ireland - and its findings were damning. The system was labelled "a disgrace”; a finding which was not calculated to make Wylde the most popular retired soldier in the eyes of the top brass.
Inevitably, not all the case's facts are known - the MoD produced public interest immunity certificates to prevent their release. For future investigators, the probable outcome is that they will be airbrushed out of history.
That is what happened when two RAF Lincoln bombers strayed over the East German border in March 1953 and one was shot down by patrolling MIG 15 fighters. All seven crew were killed, four in the crash and three when their parachutes unaccountably failed to open.
The RAF insisted that the Lincolns were unarmed and had simply made a navigational error, but at the time was widely assumed that they had been on a spying mission - a suspicion that was nourished when ammunition was found at the wreck site.
Later, the crashed Lincoln disappeared - in more ways than one. Every RAF aircraft has an official photograph, but not this one. Equally conveniently, the relevant pages from the records regarding the incident have been lost.
In the worst cases, history can be rewritten to put the writers in a better light and denigrate those unable to defend themselves. The most notorious example was the decision taken by senior officers to blacken the name of Major-General Orde Wingate, the commander of the Chindit forces in Burma, when the official history of the second world war was written in the 1950s. Wingate was a brilliant soldier but a difficult man whose rudeness was famous and whose temper was legendary.
While raising his forces, who fought behind Japanese lines in Burma in 1943 and 1944, Wingate had made many enemies among senior officers in India. After he was killed in a plane crash in March 1944 they took their revenge. The official history was supposed to be an accurate and disinterested record of all operations in the second world war, but the leading author of the Burma volume, Major-General S Woodburn Kirby, redrafted the facts to put the Chindits and Wingate in a bad light and belittle their achievements. Kirby had been director of staff duties in Delhi and had clashed with Wingate: it was assumed he was biased, but nothing could be proved.
When Major-General Derek Tulloch, Wingate's second-in-command protested, he was threatened with arrest and imprisonment in the Tower of London. It was some 40 years before the true facts about the biased writing of the Burma volume of the official history were unearthed and published.
Trevor Royle is the author of Orde Wingate: Irregular Soldier (Phoenix, £14.99).
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Cheers Bri. Agree wholeheartedly with ppruneprop. Let's hope Jauncey has some cahones and doesn't get overawed by the MoD into doing a Widgery.
Bitter experience tells me that the legal system is more than content to turn a very blind eye to senior miscreants in the MoD (presumably for the 'greater good' of 'National Security' and public confidence in 'our chaps').
However, everything's crossed and here's hoping.
Bitter experience tells me that the legal system is more than content to turn a very blind eye to senior miscreants in the MoD (presumably for the 'greater good' of 'National Security' and public confidence in 'our chaps').
However, everything's crossed and here's hoping.
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Now that I’m out, I feel I can comment more freely without the fear of the plods knocking on my door.
Some years ago I was appointed President of a Board of Inquiry into a [non-fatal] accident. We had to work bloody hard to avoid finding the guys negligent [which we considered they weren’t], because of the way the Manual was written. Basically, if they were capable of conducting a safe take-off, which of course they were otherwise they would not be flying, and they crashed, then they had to be found negligent. Only the degree of negligence varied. We managed to find them excusably negligent because of the unusual [almost unique] technical failure.
The SASO didn’t like that, wanting to hang the guilty bastards, so he ordered me to re-convene with a new set of TORs. We flatly refused to change our verdict, and thankfully the Staish [a first rate man] gave us his unqualified backing. Nonetheless, the pilot ended up with a hats on bollocking by the AOC.
However, with the loss of crown immunity, [which happened not long after my Inquiry] the whole Annex of advice on findings was completely re-written, including the bit about not finding the dead negligent.
I have now signed the petition, and knowing just how unique some of these technical failures can be, I conclude that a transient technical failure was the most probable cause. I will never accept that these 2 professionals, knowing where they were geographically, could conceivably have become spatially so unaware in such a short timescale that they allowed the aircraft to fly into rock-filled IMC.
Some years ago I was appointed President of a Board of Inquiry into a [non-fatal] accident. We had to work bloody hard to avoid finding the guys negligent [which we considered they weren’t], because of the way the Manual was written. Basically, if they were capable of conducting a safe take-off, which of course they were otherwise they would not be flying, and they crashed, then they had to be found negligent. Only the degree of negligence varied. We managed to find them excusably negligent because of the unusual [almost unique] technical failure.
The SASO didn’t like that, wanting to hang the guilty bastards, so he ordered me to re-convene with a new set of TORs. We flatly refused to change our verdict, and thankfully the Staish [a first rate man] gave us his unqualified backing. Nonetheless, the pilot ended up with a hats on bollocking by the AOC.
However, with the loss of crown immunity, [which happened not long after my Inquiry] the whole Annex of advice on findings was completely re-written, including the bit about not finding the dead negligent.
I have now signed the petition, and knowing just how unique some of these technical failures can be, I conclude that a transient technical failure was the most probable cause. I will never accept that these 2 professionals, knowing where they were geographically, could conceivably have become spatially so unaware in such a short timescale that they allowed the aircraft to fly into rock-filled IMC.
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I was on the SAR Squadron, although not on duty at the time the Chinook hit the Mull. One thing puzzled me then as it does now. What was the plan to get over the high ground with a cloudbase of 7-800 ft? Misterploppy a very interesting article but in terms of navigation what did these guys have? You say that one waypoint was the lighthouse on the Mull, well it wouldnt have commanded a turn because it never got there. If they were not spacially unaware with a suspected engine prob why didnt they do a 180? why werent they talking to Prestwick, would that have been SOP with the nature of the pax? Why didnt they get the SAR crew to give them a Radar Service?
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POSIDRIVE
The best thing to do is acquaint yourself with the extensive amount of information available (quite a lot on the www)
But briefly:
1) There was no requirement to climb at all. The route could have been flown to Inverness along the Great Glen, 1-200' above sea level. Infact the restricted icing clearance of this 'improved' Mk2, made it unlikely the crew would have contemplated a premeditated IFR climb at all.
2) The crew were almost certainly using RNS252 Supertans as their prime means of navigation. You may recall this has a GPS feed, which according to the manufacturers Racal, and Trimble, was providing remarkably accurate information.
3) This piece of navigation equipment "never designed to record historical data" was used by senior officers as a rudimentary Data Recorder (They even had the cheek to refer to it as a 'black box' in front of the HoL committee! This suggested a change of selected waypoint from Wpt1 (MoK lighthouse) to Wpt2 (Corran). The change occuring less than 2nm from Wpt1. the subsequent displayed nav data commanded a left turn to Corran, at, and presumably - though we can't be certain, upto, the time of powerdown.
4) The Captain (non handling) made an unanswered radio call to Scottish Mil during the sea transit. I am unsure why the nature of the pax would have made a call to Prestwick SOP.
5) As far as getting a radar service from the SAR crew, this was planned as a VFR flight, so how would that have worked?
6) Spatial awareness, engine failures, this is all speculation/supposition. In the very finest traditions of the Royal Air Force, the test that has to be satisfied is that of "absolutely no doubt whatsoever" before deceased aircrew can be found negligent. I can only presume that is due to the fact that they are no longer with us to give their version of events. A version which could be quite different to our limited understanding.
7) Here's hoping for a just result tomorrow. The families have said they will accept the result whatever it may be. I find it difficult to believe the MOD could take any further direct hits on this tragic saga without the whole sorry edifice crumbling around their ears. But then again!!
[ 04 February 2002: Message edited by: Tandemrotor ]</p>
The best thing to do is acquaint yourself with the extensive amount of information available (quite a lot on the www)
But briefly:
1) There was no requirement to climb at all. The route could have been flown to Inverness along the Great Glen, 1-200' above sea level. Infact the restricted icing clearance of this 'improved' Mk2, made it unlikely the crew would have contemplated a premeditated IFR climb at all.
2) The crew were almost certainly using RNS252 Supertans as their prime means of navigation. You may recall this has a GPS feed, which according to the manufacturers Racal, and Trimble, was providing remarkably accurate information.
3) This piece of navigation equipment "never designed to record historical data" was used by senior officers as a rudimentary Data Recorder (They even had the cheek to refer to it as a 'black box' in front of the HoL committee! This suggested a change of selected waypoint from Wpt1 (MoK lighthouse) to Wpt2 (Corran). The change occuring less than 2nm from Wpt1. the subsequent displayed nav data commanded a left turn to Corran, at, and presumably - though we can't be certain, upto, the time of powerdown.
4) The Captain (non handling) made an unanswered radio call to Scottish Mil during the sea transit. I am unsure why the nature of the pax would have made a call to Prestwick SOP.
5) As far as getting a radar service from the SAR crew, this was planned as a VFR flight, so how would that have worked?
6) Spatial awareness, engine failures, this is all speculation/supposition. In the very finest traditions of the Royal Air Force, the test that has to be satisfied is that of "absolutely no doubt whatsoever" before deceased aircrew can be found negligent. I can only presume that is due to the fact that they are no longer with us to give their version of events. A version which could be quite different to our limited understanding.
7) Here's hoping for a just result tomorrow. The families have said they will accept the result whatever it may be. I find it difficult to believe the MOD could take any further direct hits on this tragic saga without the whole sorry edifice crumbling around their ears. But then again!!
[ 04 February 2002: Message edited by: Tandemrotor ]</p>
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TandemRotor said:
2) The crew were almost certainly using RNS252 Supertans as their prime means of navigation. You may recall this has a GPS feed, which according to the manufacturers Racal, and Trimble, was providing remarkably accurate information
GPS or not the 252 had a habit of going walkabout at the time, I know, I was a user. Notwithstanding that old cliche of ****e in = ****e out. "Remarkably accurate" maybe, without any error? I do not think so.
Yozzer. .I signed, and pray for the "right" outcome.
2) The crew were almost certainly using RNS252 Supertans as their prime means of navigation. You may recall this has a GPS feed, which according to the manufacturers Racal, and Trimble, was providing remarkably accurate information
GPS or not the 252 had a habit of going walkabout at the time, I know, I was a user. Notwithstanding that old cliche of ****e in = ****e out. "Remarkably accurate" maybe, without any error? I do not think so.
Yozzer. .I signed, and pray for the "right" outcome.