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Lord Bach: My Lords, I am grateful for the noble and gallant Lord's remarks. I agree with him that the details announced can best be discussed during the debate.
The necessary level of airmanship was important to the rules as they then were. I cite the guide to the consideration of human failings which was attached to the regulations. It states that the duty to take care varies according to the operation being performed and the duty to take a very high degree of care is rightly imposed upon a pilot flying an aircraft or responsible for its maintenance or control. In such circumstances what might be trivial in other fields may, when associated with aircraft operations, amount to negligence. That amounts to severe criticism, but it was the standard that was set.
Lord Chalfont: My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Vivian, said, it is a matter of great regret that this Statement has been made and the response received, leaving no time for a full debate in your Lordships' House. The Minister has promised a debate in the autumn when we shall go into further details of this whole affair.
The Statement is no surprise as it seems to underline the prevalent doctrine of infallibility in the Ministry of Defence. But the conclusion is astonishing. The ministry states that it has studied the report of the House of Lords Select Committee and cannot accept its opinion. That seems to indicate that the Secretary of State for Defence prefers the opinion of two air marshals which, despite what has been said, differed from the original board of inquiry. The Secretary of State prefers to accept their opinion on a verdict of manslaughter. I am not surprised that the noble Lord appears to wince at the word, "manslaughter". If someone is found guilty of gross negligence, which leads to the death of 27 people, including himself, manslaughter is a fairly mild word to use. But that is what those young, dead pilots have been found guilty of.
It is odd that that opinion should be preferred over the judgment of a House of Lords Select Committee consisting mainly of legally qualified Peers, presided over by a distinguished former Lord of Appeal, which had all the evidence before it that the air marshals had. The Minister has said nothing new in his Statement today. All that evidence was before the House of Lords Select Committee too. The Ministry of Defence constantly asks for new evidence before it reconsiders its opinion. But, I repeat, the Ministry of Defence has said nothing new since the House of Lords Select Committee reached its conclusion.
This judgment flies in the face of the fatal accident inquiry, which was also held before a distinguished judge in Scotland, the conclusion of the Public Accounts Committee in the other place and the views of the flight operations group of the Royal Aeronautical Society. It also flies in the face of the facts of the matter. To a large extent, many of the statements made to the air marshals were found by the Select Committee to be assumptions, not facts.
What is behind this conclusion? Why is the Ministry of Defence not prepared to accept the view of legally and aeronautically qualified people outside the Ministry of Defence? It prefers instead to rely on the judgment of two senior air force officers who, in their review of the board of inquiry, ignored findings which showed no evidence of human failing on the part of anyone involved in the matter. We shall now have to wait until the autumn to ask and receive answers to many questions that will go much further than the cause of the accident. Many such questions need to be asked about why this conclusion has been reached.
I shall not pose any of those questions now, and I do not expect answers today. There is, however, one question that I should like to put to the Minister. I hope that the House can be given an answer today; it deserves one. Are the Secretary of State and the noble Lord the Minister satisfied beyond any possible doubt whatever that there was gross negligence in this case? I ask not for air staff briefings or official advice, but for the views of the Ministers concerned. Ministers are responsible to Parliament, although that sometimes seems to be forgotten. Are they clear in their minds that there is no possible doubt whatever about the gross negligence of those two young men? We await the debate in the autumn with interest.
If we cannot be assured that the Ministers concerned are themselves satisfied beyond all possible doubt about the finding of gross negligence, I shall be suggesting to your Lordships' House and a wider public that perhaps it would be correct to ignore the response of the Ministry of Defence and that the findings of the House of Lords Select Committee should be regarded as exoneration of the two pilots. In effect, that would be a refusal to accept the view of the Ministry of Defence and the verdict of the two air marshals.
The Lord Privy Seal (Lord Williams of Mostyn): My Lords, before my noble friend replies, perhaps I should remind your Lordships that we have only 20 minutes in total to discuss these matters.
Lord Bach: My Lords, I shall come straight to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont. Of course we have received advice and are persuaded on these matters. Therefore, the answer to his question is yes. I mentioned specifically in my Statement that that applies to all Ministers who have come to the Ministry of Defence since those tragic events took place. I can give the answer readily today. It is yes.
The response took so long to be published because the Select Committee's report deserved careful study. It rightly took a number of months to be prepared. It
was a very detailed report. We felt that the number of opinions that it expressed required further work, especially with regard to the original flight modelling conducted by Boeing, of which there was some criticism in the body of the report. Inevitably such work takes time, but it was important that the best possible advice was obtained to inform our response to the House. Of course it would have been preferable to publish it sooner and debate the issues before the Summer Recess, but we published it as soon as we could and are— unusually—making Statements about it in both Houses.
Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale: My Lords, I join the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, in welcoming the detailed Statement made by the Minister. It is an issue of enormous pain for the families of the pilots and all the families of the victims of the crash. I really do not know why the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, is making remarks from a sedentary position.
I remember the shock on hearing of the crash when I was abroad and not being able to find out from the initial media reports how many friends I might have had on board the Chinook. I have followed in great detail what has transpired since then in relation to the crash. For all of the bereaved, the wounds have been opened again and again.
I have a couple of questions for my noble friend—that is all that one can do when responding to a Statement. Does my noble friend agree that the absolutely indisputable facts are that the Chinook was in a wrong and dangerous position, which in the event resulted in the crash; that the MoD has looked at all possible explanations why the Chinook was in the position; and that, all other possibilities having been eliminated, responsibility has to lie with the pilots?
I understand very well the desire for a debate in this House; of course there will be one. I put it to noble Lords that perhaps the time is approaching when a line should be drawn and the wounds of bereavement allowed to start to heal.
Lord Bach: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for her comments and I shall try to answer her questions. Yes, it is right that the finding of the air marshals is based on the fact that the Chinook, which was obviously still under pilot control, found itself in a highly dangerous position. In a nutshell, that is precisely the case.
Lord Hooson: My Lords, as a member of the Select Committee—
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, we should hear first from the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, and then from the noble Lord, Lord Hooson.
Lord Tebbit: My Lords, what was the hypothesis that persuaded the Minister that two highly
experienced pilots, judged suitable to fly this most important group of people, should suddenly take leave of their senses and commit an error of airmanship so basic that if a student pilot were to attempt to do it, his instructor would stop him and probably fail him on the spot?Secondly, did the Minister read the recent newspaper reports that the Ministry of Defence is inclined to argue that the failures of the SA-80 rifle are because the Marines who are trained to use it could not do so properly?
Lord Bach: My Lords, I do not intend to attempt to answer the second question, which has absolutely nothing to do with today's very serious Statement. However, the noble Lord's first question is entirely proper. The answer is that even the most distinguished airmen—these were fine pilots—can make serious errors. They do not always, thank goodness, end up in the kind of tragedy that we are discussing today, eight years later.
I shall explain briefly how I came to the view that I expressed earlier to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont. When the pilots were some 700 or 800 yards away from the way point change, they were about one kilometre away from the coast. If they were below cloud, could see one kilometre ahead and were flying legally (they were under visual flight rules) it was negligent—here I rely to some extent on the script of the Select Committee's hearings, which I have read carefully, as I know the noble Lord will have done—that they did not start such a turn when they first made visual contact with the cliff. However, they flew on for another eight or nine seconds before the way point change. That is the first alternative. The only other alternative is that at some point earlier than one kilometre away from the cliff, they went into cloud, either voluntarily or involuntarily. In those conditions, they should without doubt have taken immediate action to outclimb the Mull of Kintyre by carrying out an emergency low-level abort and, once established in that climb, turning away to the left. They did neither. I remind the noble Lord that it is clear that at the time of the way point change, the aircraft was fully serviceable.
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