New Defence Secretary John Hutton has been immediateyl asked by campaigners to clear the names of Flight Lieutenant Jonathan Tapper and Flight Lieutenant Rick Cook, pilots of a Chinook helicopter that crashed into the hillside at Machrihanish on Argyll’s Mull of Kintyre in 1994. All on board were lost – the four aircrew and their twenty five passengers, the most senior intellligence and security staff concerned at the time with events in Northern Ireland.

An RAF board of inquiry initially cleared the pilots of any blame, saying that it was impossible to establish the exact cause of the crash. A fatal accident inquiry produced the same result.

Then two senior RAF officers – Air Vice-Marshal John Day and Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten – overturned both previous judgments, saying – with no additional evidence and in unprecedented defiance of service norms, that the pilots were guilty of gross negligence for flying too fast and too low in thick fog.

The aircraft in question was ZD576, a Mk1 Chinook. Bringing it up to Mk 2 standard, It had been fitted with a software-controlled Full Authority Digital Engine Control [Fadec] system. The Fadec upgrade made the Mk2 Chinooks notoriously unstable. At least one of the pilots on the day was said to have been unhappy at having to use this particular aircraft for the trip.

It has, from the start and since, been widely accepted that the Fadec system was indeed to blame for the aircrafts catastrophic end, with the pilots misled on their position and height and the engines suddenly winding down. (Expert evidence on the Fadec system was given to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee in 1999/2000 by Mr Malcom Perks.)

The families of the two pilots and a host of supportive campaigners have never given up on confronting the gross injustice of the continuing slur on the names of the two young pilots. A wide spectrum of media campaigns has maintained a focus on this wrong and will continue to do so. An authoritative article in July this year on a statement by retired Air Commodore Derek Hine carried his view that there is too much evidence of software problems on the type of Chinook which crashed to convince him that the pilots were definitely to blame.

The former MP for Argyll and Bute, Ray Michie who sadly died earlier this year, was a doughty supporter of the campaign. But all efforts simply led to a rubber-stamping of the two RAF officers’ eccentric judgment.

The campaign group at Westminster submitted a dossier of new evidence to then Defence Secretary Des Browne earlier this year after, at the end of last year, he had agreed to the first MOD review of the case. Mr Browne was understood to be waiting for a final report from MOD officials before coming to a decision on clearing the names of the two pilots.

The Mull of Kintyre campaigners are disappointed that Mr Browne has left the government but are now focusing on maintaining pressure on his successor.

The fabric of trust in official justice is dangerously weakened when there is such a gap between a stubborn official position and a very different view widely held and evidentially supported.

The only evidence for the standing judgment attributing ‘gross negligence’ to the dead pilots is that the aircraft crashed while the pilots were flying it.

We have covered this issue before and referred to it in related articles. We are fully supportive of the campaign to clear the names of Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook. We, too, are not going away on this one. Over to Defence Secretary, John Hutton.