§ Lord Jacobsasked Her Majesty's Government:
Regarding the inquiry into the crash of a Chinook helicopter on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1984: (a) whether the board of inquiry concluded that there were three possible causes of the accident; (b) whether the board attempted to establish the most probable cause and concluded that of the three possible causes that the crew could be blamed for two of them; (c) whether the board ruled that one of the two causes was the most probable cause of the accident; (d) how a decision upon the most probable cause of the accident can be reconciled with the requirement that a finding of negligence must only be made "where there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever"; and (e) whether the words "probable" and "absolutely no doubt whatsoever" are in contradition with one another. [HL3124]
§ The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean)The board of inquiry considered all the possible causes of the accident and attempted to establish the most probable. The Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief said, in concluding the report, "without the irrefutable evidence which is provided by an Accident Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder there is inevitably a degree of speculation as to the precise detail of the sequence of events in the minutes and seconds immediately prior to impact. What does emerge from the inquiry, however, is that there is no evidence whatever of any combination of possible minor problems, or of any major difficulty, which would have so taxed the skills of the crew that they had no option other than to keep flying towards high ground at speed at low level in deteriorating conditions of cloud and visibility. From this I am reluctantly drawn to the conclusion that the operating pilots could and would have avoided this accident had they followed a different course of action from the one they chose to pursue".