Last week in the House of Commons, Labour’s Defence Minister Lewis
Moonie unintentionally misled the House of Commons over a Chinook
accident in 1989, saying that it was not caused by the Chinook
helicopter’s FADEC software.
Documents not disclosed before, now in the possession of
Computer Weekly and Channel Four News, and summarised in
this article, contradict Moonie’s claims last week. They show that
the Chinook’s manufacturer Boeing, and the software’s three
contractors Textron Lycoming, Chandler Evans and Hawker Siddeley
had agreed that the FADEC was the cause of the 1989 accident and
that the “system needed to be redesigned”.
After the non-fatal 1989 incident, in which a Chinook owned by
the Ministry of Defence was severely damaged during a ground test
of the FADEC system, the MoD sued the manufacturers. It won a $3m
settlement from the FADEC’s contractors Textron Lycoming and the
equivalent of $500,000 from Boeing in return for releasing it from
any legal claims.
In the House of the Commons last week Moonie denied claims by
former Defence Minister, Salisbury MP Robert Key, that the legal
action was over the performance of the FADEC. “The suit mentioned
by the hon. Member for Salisbury concerned a case of negligence by
the manufacturers during a ground test of one of the helicopters -
it was not about the FADEC system itself.”
However the Ministry’s legal papers show that the MoD’s US
lawyers won their case by showing that Boeing test procedures were
“adequate and reasonable” and that the accident was caused by
“Textron’s faulty design” of FADEC.
There is no suggestion that Moonie deliberately misled the
Commons. He was reading from a text prepared by his officials.
Moonie’s comments were consistent with repeated claims by MoD
officials that FADEC is not a safety critical system and has never
caused an accident, although the Ministry’s own documents relating
to the 1989 accident show otherwise.
Five years after the accident, a Chinook crashed on the Mull of
Kintyre, killing all 29 on board including senior police and
intelligence personnel. Although the pilots were blamed for the
crash on the mull, doubts about whether the FADEC could have played
a major role have deepened.
A primary cause of the 1989 accident was an “E5” fault code in
the FADEC - the same fault code that was found on a FADEC that
survived the crash on the Mull of Kintyre.
For different reasons, the causes of the accident in 1989 are
regarded as important by the Ministry and Defence and to
campaigners who are seeking to clear the names of the two pilots
who were blamed for the crash on the Mull.
Campaigners say that although two air marshals found the pilots
grossly negligent FADEC or other problems could have caused the
accident on the Mull. It was recognised by the RAF Board of Inquiry
into the crash on the Mull that FADEC could have contributed to the
accident.
To these campaigners the incident in 1989 is significant because
they say it shows not only that FADEC was capable of causing an
uncontrollable engine surge and the possible loss of an aircraft,
but that this is what happened in 1989.
For the MoD the accident is important because it has made
official statements to MPs since the Mull crash that the FADEC is
not a safety critical system and cannot cause a potentially
catastrophic accident.
Were the Ministry now to accept now that the FADEC caused the
accident in 1989, this would not only undermine its claims that the
FADEC is not safety critical.
More seriously, it would suggest that the MoD was wrong in the
reasons it gave for approving the FADEC for operational service in
Chinook Mk2 helicopter types in 1993.
The Ministry’s airworthiness assessors at Boscombe Down had said
it was “essential” that the software was rewritten before the FADEC
was deployed in an operational aircraft. But the MoD overruled
Boscombe Down saying that the FADEC had never caused an accident
and was not critical to safety.
Last week, in the first Commons debate on the crash on the Mull
of Kintyre, Moonie described the MoD’s official position on the
1989 accident as that which the Ministry had gone to lengths to
discredit during the arbitration proceedings.
He said the case brought by the Ministry of Defence after the
1989 accident “concerned a case of negligence by the manufacturers
during a ground test of one the helicopters - it was not about the
FADEC system itself”.
A similar statement was made by the then Defence Minister John
Reid to the Defence Committee in 1998. He said that the legal
action arising from the 1989 accident “was not - I repeat, it was
not - on account of the failure of the [FADEC] software”. Reid had
added that this was “one of the misconceptions that has been
unfortunately allowed to flourish … the case was essentially
against Boeing and Textron Lycoming for negligence in their testing
procedures, not against the software”.
Another Minister Doug Henderson later confirmed the veracity of
Reid’s comments in a letter to Bruce George, chairman of the
Defence Committee.
Ironically, Moonie’s incorrect statement last week came at the
end of a Commons debate in which several MPs criticised the
Ministry of Defence for issuing misleading and incorrect
statements, many of them related to the FADEC.
In the minds of some MPs and Lords it is not only the blaming of
the pilots of Chinook ZD576 that merits an independent inquiry.
They feel that the conduct and integrity of the MoD itself should
be put on trial.