An inquiry into an air crash that caused the British forces’ worst loss of life in decades concluded that corner-cutting on safety led to the fiery explosion in 2006 of a Nimrod surveillance aircraft over Afghanistan, killing all 14 crewmen aboard.
The report was severely critical of the Defense Ministry, the Royal Air Force (RAF) and two of Britain’s largest defense contractors, BAE Systems and QinetiQ, for failing to correct longstanding design flaws in the Nimrod aircraft.
A variant of the Comet, a British aircraft that became the world’s first jetliner in the early 1950s, the Nimrod was built for an anti-submarine role but has been used in Afghanistan and Iraq for patrolling over battle zones and aiding communications among ground troops.
Reaffirming the findings of earlier inquiries, the latest review concluded that midair refueling had put fuel aboard the Nimrod in contact with a hot-air duct while the aircraft was patrolling at high altitude over southern Afghanistan, causing it to catch fire and plunge to the desert near Kandahar.
But the aviation law specialist appointed by the government to conduct the inquiry, Charles Haddon-Cave, went beyond previous reviews by using his 582-page report to deliver a scathing indictment of the defense policy of the Labour government.
His principal conclusion was that cost-saving measures instituted after a defense review in 1998, the year after the Labour Party came to power in the first of three successive general election victories, were at the root of the crash.
The report said the 1998 defense review had introduced “a shift in culture and priorities” in the armed forces, substituting “business and financial targets” for “functional values such as safety and airworthiness.”
The report quoted one senior RAF officer as having told the inquiry that while concern for air safety had been a major criterion for promotion up to the 1990s, under Labour policy “you had to be on top of your budget if you wanted to get ahead.”
The inquiry also showed that the RAF, BAE Systems and QinetiQ, as well as the Defense Ministry, had been aware for years of the fire risk to the aircraft after midair refueling, but had failed to take effective steps to eliminate it.
The report identified 10 individuals as sharing responsibility for the failure, including a general and an air marshal, and five officials working for the defense contractors.
It described as “lamentable” a safety review that the Defense Ministry and the contractors conducted a year before the Nimrod crash.
That safety review, the report said, was “a story of incompetence, complacency and cynicism.”
RSS