2 June last was the 20th anniversary of the RAF’s worst peacetime disaster. Not that you would know that. The anniversary passed without comment or commemorations that I could detect.
The disaster was the crash of an RAF Chinook helicopter (ZD576) into the side of a mountain on the Mull of Kintyre (SW Scotland). It killed everyone on board instantly: four crew and 25 passengers, the latter all experienced counter-intelligence officers (police and military), headed for a conference at Fort George near Inverness. Their speciality was dealing with the IRA insurgency in Northern Ireland, from where they came.
I described the incident in the only book devoted entirely to this accident (Chinook Crash), published in 2004. I covered, not just the background to the flight and the crash itself, but the complicated aftermath, which included several inquiries, from a Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry to debates and inquiries in the UK Parliament (the Scottish Parliament has never interested itself in the matter). My book also described a possible cause of the accident—namely a navigation error.
The disaster was the crash of an RAF Chinook helicopter (ZD576) into the side of a mountain on the Mull of Kintyre (SW Scotland). It killed everyone on board instantly: four crew and 25 passengers, the latter all experienced counter-intelligence officers (police and military), headed for a conference at Fort George near Inverness. Their speciality was dealing with the IRA insurgency in Northern Ireland, from where they came.
I described the incident in the only book devoted entirely to this accident (Chinook Crash), published in 2004. I covered, not just the background to the flight and the crash itself, but the complicated aftermath, which included several inquiries, from a Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry to debates and inquiries in the UK Parliament (the Scottish Parliament has never interested itself in the matter). My book also described a possible cause of the accident—namely a navigation error.
Strangely, the Ministry of Defence (MoD), if it took any notice of my book, took no action and did not approach me on the matter. This was despite its own investigations, which had led to no conclusion regarding the actual cause, apart from blaming the pilots for ignoring flight safety rules regarding flying without sight of the ground (they were flying in fog at the time, with almost no visibility). These rules were designed to prevent ‘Controlled Flight Into Terrain’ (CFIT), a major cause of aircraft accidents around the world. It stood out a mile that CFIT was the cause of this accident, but that left the question of why it did so.
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