Hutton refuses to clear Chinook pilots Tapper and Cook of ‘gross negligence’ for 1994 Machrihanish crash

Pilots Jonathan Tapper and RIck Cook died in 1994 along with their high level intelligence and police passengers. The Chinook helicopter they were flying from Northern Ireland to Inverness crashed into the hill side at Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre near Campbeltown, with the loss of all twenty-nine on board.

The crash happened in heavy fog and with an aircraft fitted with a Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC) system known to be unreliable.

The two pilots were initially cleared of blame but two years later a fatal accident inquiry by two senior RAF officers acting alone overturned the earlier decision. They judged that the pilots had been flying too fast and too low in thick fog. They did not seem to consider that the men would not have taken risks with their own lives in an aircraft that at least one of them allegedly had not wanted to fly that day.

This fatal accident enquiry found the pilots guilty of gross negligence – an unprecedented finding in military circles when servicemen involved in an incident have died and there is no conclusive evidence on the cause, as was the case in the Machrihanish crash.

The families of the two men and a wide spectrum of supporters including a cross-party Campaign Group of Westminster MPs have fought doggedly ever since this finding to clear the names of Tapper and Cook. Former Lib Dem MP for Argyll and Bute, Ray Michie, later Baroness Michie, was a leading member of the group. At the point when John Hutton was approached by the Mull of Kintyre Campaign Group, Jim Mather, Argyll’s MSP sent For Argyll a statement on his own support for the cause of clearing the names of the pilots who cannot speak for themselves.

The previous Secretary of State for Defence – who was simultaneously Secretary of State for Scotland, Des Browne, had agreed to review the case and consider a dossier of previously unheard evidence presented to him by the Campaign Group. He has since returned to the back benches at Westminster.

His replacement is John Hutton, an ambitious career politician who is said to have demanded the Defence job as a condition of agreeing to become a member of the troubled Gordon Brown’s cabinet.

On Hutton’s succession, the campaigners asked him to continue the review to which Browne had committed himself.

Mr Hutton has now had a meeting with the campaigners to say that the findings of gross negligence against Tapper and Cook will stand because his review has led him to decide that there is no new evidence to be considered.

The hard political reality is that there never was any way an ambitious new Minister like Hutton was going to set himself against the military establishent and particularly so early in his preferment.

It is unlikely that the campaigners will give up. The findings were so sharply unjust. There is another story to be told and, if not to be recognised, at least to be taken into account. It relates to the FADEC system and it is known within the RAF as well as more than guessed-at outside it.

There will at some point have to be a different finding, clearing Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook of gross negligence. It would be doubly wrong if real politique was allowed to delay this moment until after the deaths of the family members who have fought so hard and so long for justice for the two dead men.

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