§ Mr. SwayneTo ask the Secretary of State for Defence if the Air Accident Investigation Branch ruled out the possibility of any technical malfunction which may have contributed to the loss of Chinook ZD576 in June 1994. [108696]
§ Mr. Spellar[holding answer 15 February 2000]: The Air Accident Investigation Branch acted as technical adviser to the RAF Board of Inquiry and produced a comprehensive report on the technical investigation that formed part of the evidence used by the Inquiry. The AAIB concluded that although the pre-impact serviceability of the aircraft could not be positively verified, no evidence was found of a malfunction that could have contributed to the accident, with the possible exception of a radar altimeter system fault.
The AAIB noted several radar altimeter system defects and considered them in detail, but observed that they had probably not severely degraded performance, and there were probably generally correct indications at impact.
After careful consideration of all the available evidence the RAF Board of Inquiry concluded that the most probable cause of the accident was that the crew selected an inappropriate rate of climb to safety overfly the Mull of Kintyre, and the actions of the crew were thus held to be the direct cause of the crash.