Posted by
whoyg2562 on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 10:45:12 PM
There had been signs before the disaster that the
Nimrod MR2, of which aircraft XV230 was one, had design faults, notably
the juxtaposition of fuel pipes with hot-air ducts which presented a
“catastrophic fire risk”. Mr Haddon-Cave said new evidence had revealed
that fuel had overflowed into a
pearl jewelry dry tank
during air-to-air refuelling. But when BAE Systems carried out a safety
review between 2001 and 2005, the flaw was not discovered.
“The Nimrod safety case was a pearl jewelry lamentable job from
start to finish,” the report said. “It was riddled with errors. It
missed the key dangers. Its production is a story of incompetence,
complacency and cynicism. The best opportunity to prevent the accident
to XV230 was, tragically, lost.” Mr Haddon-Cave said the Nimrod safety
review was “fatally undermined by a general malaise: a widespread
assumption by those involved that the Nimrod was ‘safe anyway’ (because
it had flown successfully for 30 years) and the task of drawing up the
safety case became essentially a paperwork and ‘tick-box’ exercise”.
The MoD announced in March that any Nimrod that had not had its
hot-air duct removed — the perceived design fault identified in the
RAF’s board of inquiry report in December 2007 — would not be flown
until the work was done. An RAF spokesman said all 11 Nimrod MR2s at
RAF Kinloss in Morayshire and three MR1s at RAF Waddington in
Lincolnshire had now had the air ducts removed. No Nimrod is flying in
Afghanistan. Mr Haddon-Cave said of those on the biwa pearl
aircraft: “Faced with a life-threatening emergency, every member of the
crew of XV230 acted with calmness, bravery and professionalism, and in
accordance with their training. They had no chance, however, of
controlling the fire. Their fate was already sealed before the first
fire warning.”
If the Nimrod safety case by BAE Systems, monitored by QinetiQ, had
been drawn up “with proper skill, care and attention, the catastrophic
fire risks dormant within the wholesale pearl jewelry Nimrod MR2 fleet
would have been identified and dealt with, and the loss of XV230 in
September 2006 would have been avoided”, Mr Haddon-Cave said.
He likened the organisational causes to those of other disasters,
in particular the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, the
sinking of the ferry Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987, the King’s
Cross Underground station fire in 1987 and the Marchioness riverboat’s
sinking in 1989.
Poor procurement practices had damaging effects. The Nimrod MR2
should have been replaced by the Nimrod MRA4, but the programme had
been delayed. “But for the delays in the Nimrod MRA4 replacement
programme, XV230 would probably no longer have been flying in September
2006,” Mr Haddon-Cave said.
A former RAF officer had told his inquiry: “There pearl jewelry
wholesale was no doubt that the culture of the time had switched. In
the akoya pearl days of
the RAF chief engineer in the 1990s, you had to be on top of
airworthiness. By 2004 you had to be on top of your budget if you
wanted to get ahead.”