The Public Accounts Committee report into the Mull of Kintyre
helicopter crash vindicates
Computer Weekly's three-year
campaign for justice. It concludes - as did the report of the
original RAF inquiry - that there is insufficient evidence to blame
pilots Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook for the crash.
The verdict of gross negligence against them must now be
overturned.
The air marshals who overruled the initial report lacked crucial
evidence. Computer Weekly has unearthed that evidence in its
investigations. The safety-critical Fadec software had a history of
faults. The warnings of test pilots and Ministry of Defence IT
specialists were overruled. And the MoD was involved in a $3m
safety lawsuit against Fadec's manufacturers as the negligence
verdict was given.
We will never know if the Fadec software caused the crash. But
the PAC's verdict - that it cannot be ruled out - should be enough
to bring the suffering of the pilots' families to an end.
Meanwhile, the fight for government, civil servants and the
military to learn the lessons of Chinook must go on. Since the
crash, there has been a pattern of misinformation and obstruction
that raises issues much wider than the causes of the crash
itself.
Ministers have repeatedly and unwittingly misled the House of
Commons in statements based on inadequate briefings from MoD
officials. Right to the bitter end the MoD was withholding key
reports about previous Fadec-related incidents from MPs.
An eddy of change has touched Whitehall's attitude to IT
procurement in the past 12 months. It is now recognised that the
lack of accountability and reluctance to admit failure have cost
taxpayers millions of pounds, as one large IT project after another
has failed. Defence procurement is itself now under the same
scrutiny.
So it is ironic that decision makers at the heart of Britain's
defence establishment have struggled so hard and so long to prevent
the truth about the crash being known.
Conspiracy theories will abound - fuelled by the devastating
blow the crash dealt to the intelligence community. But, after two
years of close contact with the MoD, and the MPs and peers to whom
it is accountable, Computer Weekly does not subscribe to the
conspiracy theory.
Rather, the process that blamed two dead pilots while
whitewashing the reputations of commanders, civil servants and
software manufacturers must be seen as the spontaneous reflex of a
system badly in need of reform.
National security concerns will always mean that some evidence
must be considered behind closed doors. But the Chinook inquiry has
been characterised by the inability of even ministers to get a
straight story from the MoD, and by the inability of the most
trusted and independent MPs and peers to gain access to vital
information.
Society needs to face up to the challenge of accountability
posed by sophisticated IT systems. Life or death decisions are
entrusted to machines and, in the case of catastrophic failure, the
evidence of malfunction is often only circumstantial.
Over the past three years Computer Weekly has uncovered
key circumstantial evidence that some in Whitehall were determined
to suppress, ignore or discredit. The PAC and its chairman David
Davis should be congratulated for their verdict on the case.