It’s an annual pilgrimage for many. The families of the 29 men who were aboard that fatal Chinook helicopter are gathering in the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland today, at the place where the helicopter crashed into a mountain, plunging the crew and passengers to their deaths.
It’s been thirty years since the RAF suffered its worst peacetime accident. Thirty years since Dr Susan Phoenix kissed her husband goodbye for the final time. Ian Phoenix was heading up a counter-terrorism team, travelling from Northern Ireland to Inverness for a peace conference. In 1994, Northern Ireland was just emerging from The Troubles, the Good Friday agreement was on the horizon, but not yet in plain sight. The Chinook helicopter was transporting 25 of the country’s top counter-terrorism experts to the conference, to plan for peace in the Province.
But something went wrong. Tragically wrong. Eyewitnesses saw the Chinook flying very low over the sea, before failing to rise in time to avoid the plunging landscape of the Mull of Kintyre.
Susan Phoenix was driving when the news came through on her radio. “I was just driving along, shouting No, no, no,” she tells me, from her sun-soaked garden in Portland, Dorset. “I can still see it. I can still feel it even 30 years on.”
She can still feel the disbelief too. Within weeks of the accident, a Board of Inquiry concluded the pilots were to blame for the crash. Flight Lieutenants Richard Cook and Jonathan Tapper were accused of “gross negligence”, in a verdict that was said to be “beyond any doubt”.
But Susan Phoenix had doubts. Many doubts. “My immediate thought was, that isn't right because I knew that Ian respected Special Forces Pilots and I knew they were the top level,” she tells me. “I can see them now, trying to pull that aircraft up - something had gone badly wrong because they flew into the side of the mountain but they were trying to the very last to pull up the nose and they couldn't, so there is no doubt there was something wrong with the craft.”
Susan wasn’t the only one who was having doubts. Aeronautical experts and lawyers were asking questions. There was no flight recorder. No voice recorder. Eighty per cent of the aircraft was destroyed on impact. So, what was the Ministry of Defence’s evidence that made them certain – beyond any doubt – that the pilots were culpable?
In 2011, the families of the pilots got their answer. There was none. Not a scrap of evidence, just an assumption that the pilots could have steered the craft to safety if they’d tried. The Defence Secretary at the time, Liam Fox, issued an apology to the families and to the House of Commons.
The Ministry of Defence had lied.
But what were they hiding? If the pilots hadn’t brought down the helicopter, what had?
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Could it be, that there was a fault with the helicopter itself? David Hill was an aeronautical engineer for the MOD at the time. He says the Ministry had seen its safety budget slashed, in the run-up to the accident.
“The chances of the aircraft being un-airworthy were very high indeed,” he says. “A policy is only an aspiration unless it's funded. And maintaining airworthiness hadn’t been funded from April 1991 for three whole years.”
Had the Ministry of Defence skimped on safety precautions, to save money? Is this their secret? David Hill believes this is only the start.
At the time of the crash, systematic errors in the software that controlled the engines, had been reported. In fact, the MOD were in a legal dispute with the manufacturers of this software – a fact that wasn’t shared with the inquiry. Furthermore, experts claim the Ministry knew there were problems with the Chinook Mark 2 and the craft had been grounded for several weeks.
“The evidence doesn't lie, people do,” says David Hill. “We've got hard copy reports, documents saying the aircraft is not airworthy, you are not permitted to fly it. And the Assistant Chief of Airstaff, a couple of weeks later, turned around and told Aircrew it was airworthy.”
The Pilots themselves had expressed concern. There were huge chunks of the training manual that were missing. Whole chapters that hadn’t been written. One of the pilots had doubled his life assurance in the weeks leading to the crash, and both had told their bosses, the Chinook Mark 2 shouldn’t be in the air. Their concerns were ignored.
The Ministry of Defence told GB News: “In 2010 the Mull of Kintyre independent review was carried out and the findings were fully accepted. The review did not find new evidence to suggest mechanical failure and no safety issues with the Chinook Mark 2 were raised in the report.”
But GB News has seen letters from the Ministry of Defence to Susan Phoenix, admitting they’d been lying. And the families want answers. What actually happened, that foggy night on the Mull of Kintyre? Why were the MOD so quick to blame the pilots? Dead men have no right of reply. And why are they still saying there is no new evidence when safety concerns about this particular helicopter had been made again and again?
Could it be, that the Ministry knew there were problems with this craft and flew it anyway? Was the software that controls the engines, really have been faulty? If not, why were the Ministry suing the manufacturers at the time? Could the Government cuts to the MoD budget have resulted in corners being cut?
Who has blood on their hands?
We may never know. Or at least not for many decades. In the past few months, the families of the dead have learned that the Ministry’s file on the disaster has been locked away for a hundred years from the date of the accident. No-one can see inside it. No-one can know the truth.
“Why would you lock up a document unless it was going to incriminate somebody?” asks Susan Phoenix.“Who was protecting who? They were quite willing to sacrifice that Chinook and all on it for somebody's reputation, I do believe.”
David Hill goes even further: “They made a deliberate decision to fly that aircraft, knowing it wasn’t airworthy. And in my view, that demands legal action – that meets the legal criteria for corporate manslaughter and gross negligence - manslaughter - against individuals.”
This weekend, as the bereaved families gather on the Mull of Kintyre to remember and reflect, there are calls for answers, calls for the Ministry to release their file and to explain exactly why it’s been locked up in the first place.
Some say it’s a miscarriage of justice, akin to the Post Office scandal. Faulty software, leading to untold misery and ruined lives, and a cover-up at the very heart of the establishment. By the time the files are released, anyone who could be prosecuted, will be long dead. But so will the widows and sons and daughters and parents of the men who died. They will never have closure, they will never know what happened that night. And that, some say, is the greatest miscarriage of justice, of them all.
