MoD rejects new claims about airworthiness of death-crash Chinook

The Sunday Times reported yesterday that the RAF warned pilots of a fault that could affect the safe operation of the Chinook Mark 2 helicopters seven months before the Mull of Kintyre crash.

Senior police, Army and MI5 officers were among the dead when a Chinook crashed in thick fog on a remote hillside on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994 during a flight from Belfast to Inverness.

An initial RAF inquiry in 1995 ruled that the pilots, Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Richard Cook, were guilty of “gross negligence” for flying too low and too fast.

The pilots were cleared in July last year after a review by Lord Philip ruled it was impossible to know what had happened.

But the newspaper reported that a “special instruction” was issued to RAF aircrew in November 1993 warning that a connector on the digital engine control unit had “worked loose in flight”.

Jimmy Jones, a former RAF engineer who obtained the documents under Freedom of Information legislation, told the newspaper: “This aircraft could not be described as airworthy.”

An apparently previously undisclosed report from 1992 also suggested there were official concerns over the airworthiness of the RAF’s fleet of Chinooks two years before the fatal crash.

It is understood the report, unearthed from the House of Commons library, was not considered in the four previous inquiries into the crash.

But a Ministry of Defence spokesman said: “Exhaustive investigations have been completed into the tragic Mull of Kintyre incident, in which no evidence of technical or mechanical failure were identified.”