Talk:Chinook helicopter crash

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As a matter of Edit, the aircraft seems to have been flying Northbound, out of rather than to Northern Ireland, for a meeting in Scotland.

There are two threads to the controversy about this crash. The technical issues about this model are difficult enough. The power management system of this model was under great suspicion before the incident. A similar crash to a similar model Chinook in the continental US apparently led the maker Boeing to pay substantial compensation to dependents of its victims. It may be nothing to do with it that the RAF's procurement of the successor HC3 model of the Chinook, two years after the accident, was so disastrously handled that the new aircraft have not been and may never be brought into service.

The Royal Air Force Commander and Commander-in-Chief of the formation in which the aircraft belonged found the pilots guilty of gross negligence. They ignored much of the evidence and overrode the inconclusive recommendations of the Board of Inquiry in order to do so. Few aviators were persuaded by this judgement. Aviators naturally feel that it is unnecessary and likely to be unjust to blame completely those aircrews who die in this way. Most significantly a select committee of the House of Lords, chaired by a very senior judge, would have overturned the judgement. The Ministry of Defence obdurately refuses to change the initial judgement to this day.

These opinions and the House of Lords report can be reached through http://chinook-justice.org/.

Thanks for that. I've updated the description of the direction of the flight and added an external link.

Just so you know, anyone can edit a Wikipedia article, even without creating an account. So if you want to expand on what we have in the article so far, please feel free to do so. -- Solipsist 12:01, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 Old page 2 Tone of this page 3 GCHQ 4 Effects on IRA war

[edit] Old page

Just a note that a different version (pre-merge) of this page is at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chinook_crash_on_Mull_of_Kintyre&oldid=25307986 Ojw 22:27, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

I took out the conspiracy theory about the secret Mach 5 stealth plane ('Aurora') having caused the crash, as there is absolutely no evidence for this. John

And again. Bringing some wacky conspiracy theory into it shows no respect for the dead, or for the truth.

John

This article seems to have become rather bland and devoid of information recently.

I think our phrase "The official inquiry was pilot error, although this has often been disputed" doesn't even begin to cover the number of people (RAF Board of Inquiry, Fatal Accident Inquiry, House of Commons Defence Committee, House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, and House of Lords Select Committee) who officially expressed those doubts.

For example, how does wikipedia benefit from removing the House of Lords Select Committee's opinion that the pilot error theory was "incomprehensible/not justified"? Ojw 13:24, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tone of this page

I think this page gives too much weight to the FADEC theory. The HOL inquiry quoted (and I have read it) does not say that FADEC was to blame. It says that the original verdict that pilot error was *solely* to blame, was unjustified. In legal terms, that is like saying that a conviction was 'unsafe'. It is emphatically not a 'not guilty' verdict. Furthermore, to think of it like this (as much public opinion seems to, and as the tone of the current article implies), is to misunderstand the terms of reference of the original enquiry, in my opinion.

If you compare this to Wiki's coverage of Pan Am Flight 103, it focusses on the official expanation of the crash, rather than the various other theories. I recently re-edited the 'Paris crash' section of the Concorde article to reflect a greater balance in this regard. Like Andrew Brookes in Flight to Disaster (written before the HOL report), I think the balance of probability is that pilot error through fatigue played a part, maybe the greater part in causing the crash.

What would you say to a more NPOV treatment in this article? Guinnog 01:20, 9 February 2006 (UTC) (AKA 'John' above, before I had an account)

I think you are right. I'd say 'go for it', but there are several people who edit here, so there might be some other opinions. -- Solipsist 07:32, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

See what you think, I've tried to make the article a little more encyclopedic. Guinnog 19:59, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GCHQ

In researching my rewrite of this article, I've come across no source for the claim that GCHQ personnel were on board. Is there a cite, or do we have to have an 'allegedly' in there? Guinnog 20:43, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to take down the GCHQ rather than add an 'allegedly' or a ^{[citation needed]} tag. Hope that's ok. Guinnog 21:54, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't notice your earlier question. Here is one source that mentions GCHQ personel, although I can't vouch for its accuracy and I don't think it is the source that I originally got the infomation from. That was probably chinook-justice.org, but I can't find any mention of it there now. -- Solipsist 08:40, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Effects on IRA war

This is quite a frequent comment, for example in the Brookes book. I've thrown in the reference on the BBC coverage for now, but there are many more specialist ones I could cite. One hates to refer to 'common sense', but it would seem to be such that removing so many senior personnel at one stroke would weaken the ability of the team.

Brookes also refers to the tragedy of their deaths coming so soon before the ceasefire and the peace process, but I thought that too emotional for an encyclopedia article.

You were right to pick up my exaggeration about the scale of the loss though. Guinnog 17:37, 5 April 2006 (UTC)