TUESDAY 16 OCTOBER 2001

SQUADRON LEADER ROBERT BURKE

  660. Have you any idea why you were given that order?

  A. That is speculation, my Lord, and I cannot answer that question.

  661. As a result, am I right in thinking you did not give evidence to the Board?

  A. I gave evidence to neither the FAI nor the Board of Inquiry. The only formal evidence, if it can be called that, was I gave evidence to the National Audit Office when they asked me, and you have seen a copy of their report.

  Chairman: Thank you.

  662. Could I pursue one small point, my Lord Chairman. Were your discussions with Mr Cable on the subject of FADEC only?

  A. No, particularly on control positions because that is an area in which I had specific expertise.

  663. So not FADEC?

  A. No it was not. FADEC had not come into it. It was not mentioned between Mr Cable and myself at that stage.

  Lord Tombs: Thank you.

  664. I wonder if you would now have in front of you the collection of documents which you sent to Mr Makower on 7 October. First of all, I think it would be appropriate to turn to "FADEC logic".

  A. My Lord, that is a highly unofficial document which I produced in case the Board of Inquiry needed it. It could be called an "idiot's guide to FADEC". I do not think one exists now because it is a very complicated system, difficult to understand, and, indeed, in spite of the efforts of the team that went across to Boeing and everybody else, at that stage FADEC was not well understood. I produced a quite unofficial document along with one or two others you have not got, I might say, for the guidance of the Board of Inquiry if they wanted it.

  665. That is ideally suited for a Committee of four laymen and one engineer.

  A. I did think very carefully before I sent that.

  666. But perhaps to avoid taking you right through this, may I take it that this is really a child's guide, it explains the various components of the FADEC system?

  A. It is very simplistic guidance to how it works. I would prefer not to discuss it in here because it is going to take an awful long time to go in the detail of FADEC.

  667. We have established what it is and we will bear that in mind.

  A. I might say I have just shown it to a current Chinook pilot and he said,"We still have not got something like this and we still need it." He had not seen it before.

  668. Did you have any contact with any members of the Board of Inquiry informally?

  A. None at that stage and I have not on purpose, to the extent that although I am an honorary member of the RAF Officers' Mess at Odiham and I live there still, I have made a point of not in the last year going into the Mess even for a drink because it might be misconstrued.

  669. Could we turn to the document headed "Defence Select Committee".

  A. Could you read out the section you want.

  670. It is headed "Defence Select Committee" and it comes in our bundle immediately after a letter of yours.

  A. Could you read it out to me, my Lord. I have so many documents here I am not sure which one you are referring to. I have been sent documents left, right and centre.

  671. As I understand it, this was a critique of what the Minister had said to the Defence Select Committee.

  A. Yes, that is right.

  672. I take it again you did not give evidence to this Committee.

  A. I sat there as a member of the public and got slightly hot under the collar when a large part of the beginning, if you have seen the video or read the proceedings, was a hatchet job done on me. So I was sitting there and I did take note.

  673. Perhaps we can just go through this fairly quickly. The Minister said that there was only one Chinook accident before the Mull of Kintyre. You said that there had been seven including Hanover. Can you tell us the circumstances of what those were?

  A. I do not have that list but I can tell you some of them because I was involved in two of them in one capacity or another. The Hanover one was a pilot error taxiing accident; one flew into a snow-covered hill in the Falklands; one crashed, killing some of my test crew in the Falklands, unexplained, it just nosedived into the ground basically from 700 feet. One crashed on a training exercise when the instructer pulled back the speed selector, basically the same as an accelerator, on one engine and there was a dormant fault in the other engine and the aircraft crashed half upside down in woods. I was involved in that directly because I acted as the rescue helicopter for them. There were also two nearly identical accidents one of which involved me and half my test crew; the other involved the other half of my test crew and another pilot in the Falklands when there were massive gearbox failures and my helicopter came down in two large parts. The front rotor flew off somewhere else and the rest of the aircraft landed with me and the crew in it. Those were massive technical failures and they were within 24 hours of one another. In another aircraft there was a fire in the auxiliary power unit at the back and the aircraft caught fire internally. That is from memory but the MoD records are there.

  674. Were any of these related to the FADEC system?

  A. No these were all on Mark Is. The Mark II had only just come in. If I may reinforce the point that Squadron Leader Morgan made yesterday in his very clear and excellent evidence, from the pilot's point of view, apart from technical malfunctions the Mark II was almost identical to fly, in fact slightly easier because when FADEC was working properly, which it was most of time, it made rotor speed control much easier so, from a pilot's point of view, except for the different technical features (which are obviously very important when you have emergencies) the Mark I and Mark II were essentially the same. That is why we had such a very short conversion phase of about five hours or something.

  675. Do you know the circumstances in which the pilots at Boscombe Down had refused to fly a Chinook Mark II?

  A. I can only talk about basically what I know, and I heard Squadron Leader Morgan's comments on it yesterday; I was here. My perception was somewhat different because I was talking to Boscombe Down, just like the OCU were, not on a daily basis, but on a reasonably regular basis as part of my job as the unit test pilot at Odiham. It was part of my terms of reference to keep contact with other test organisations, which I did both here and with Boeing quite a lot. My very strong perception, particularly when talking to the senior man in the Chinook project team, the American major, was they were very unhappy with the FADEC system generally, extremely unhappy, because they had had a lot of problems, particularly on the ground, with the engines running up and running down. Whether they refused to fly it or not I can only comment on the following, the atmosphere between Boscombe Down and RAF Odiham was very strained indeed, especially after the accident—it was pretty strained beforehand because of restrictions on the aircraft and one or two other things. It got to such a point that Boscombe Down sent a project team up to Odiham and briefed the executives at Odiham the station commander and senior engineering officers, flight commanders and myself. They made a formal presentation at Odiham on the problems they had been having at Boscombe Down. It lasted about an hour and a half. When the meeting ended the atmosphere was even less amicable than when it began. There was no doubt in my mind, I cannot speak for others, well I can to a certain extent because we discussed it when we came out of the meeting, that Boscombe Down's air crew were not prepared to fly the Chinook or continue flying it because of problems with the FADEC, they were not happy with the reliability of the system. I can also say that I personally had to fly the Boscombe Down aircraft back to Odiham for a minor servicing, me and an Odiham crew, because the Boscombe Down crew would not fly it. To fly this particular aircraft, because of paperwork considerations, the aircraft was assigned to MOD (PE) at Boscombe Down, not the RAF, so it was their aircraft. It was also fitted with quite a lot of non-standard test equipment, so it had modifications. For me to fly it back a "service deviation" or a series of them had to be issued to allow me as an RAF pilot, not a Boscombe pilot, to fly it back and for me to fly the aircraft with these various modifications. I suggested many times that it would be much easier if Boscombe flew the 12 minutes back to Odiham and they would not do so. I spoke to the pilots and they would not do so. I then asked the pilots if they were prepared to meet me at Boscombe Down and discuss the implications of these modifications and they would not appear, they would not do that. So my perception of whether Boscombe would fly or not was very different, perhaps, to that received by Squadron Morgan in his one telephone call. I was quite interested to know when he said Boscombe rang up the next day after the crash and said it was basically nothing to do with why they stopped flying. How they knew what was wrong at Boscombe Down I have no idea, considering we are still discussing it some seven years later. I believe a number of people have also drawn your attention to a document which was a draft DO (Demi Official Letter) from the AOCinC to the ACAS about Chinook flying, which has apparently had fairly wide circulation. I am not sure how. You have a copy of it so you are able to read the first paragraph, "it is, a) announced for the second time this year because of their concerns about safety of the FADEC system they had stopped trials flying the Chinook Mark II". It could not be much clearer than that, it was from a very senior airman. It goes on to say, "we are all agreed", this is Boeing and ourselves, the RAF, the frontline squadrons, "the Chinook Mark II is safe to operate and there can be no excuse for AAEE not to fly at least to these parameters". That was pretty well the view of most of the frontline pilots in the RAF at the time in the Chinook force.

  676. Are the Boscombe Down pilots civilian or service pilots?

  A. They were service pilots at that time, one was an American officer on exchange and the other one, who I have spoken to since then, is retired working in the City now. The project leader was an American Army pilot on exchange, he may have been an American Air Force pilot, Major Myers.

  677. Did you gather that the sense of unease was due to their own experience or general gossip in the Mess?

  A. I can go into that in some detail, my Lord, the Boscombe Down one, and people knew what was going on at Boscombe Down, was because they had unexplained run ups and run downs and things. At RAF Odiham we had a series of problems with the Chinook Mark II, particularly concerning FADEC. I can only go into these quite specifically, one was dealt with at considerable length yesterday, the testing for the overspeed system. One of the concerns of any helicopter pilot is that the rotor will overspeed to the point where it will be seriously overstressed and fly off. I make that statement quite categorically. That is a major problem. Any rotor if you overspeed it and overstress it is likely to fly off. All helicopter pilots are aware of that. The designers of FADEC were equally aware of that and incorporated a last ditch system, basically that if the rotor speed got to 114 per cent, or something like that, this system cut in and stopped any more fuel flowing to the engine. This overspeed trip was probably the system which gave us the most problem of all when we were testing it on the ground. Boscombe insisted we had to test it before every flight because they said, "we are not very confident in FADEC, you have to test this before every flight". This test procedure led to a number of run ups and run downs. Pilots did not like doing it because you had to watch the engine like a hawk in case they over temped or ran away. You heard a great deal about it yesterday. There were a number of other concerns, so many in fact that the squadrons—I cannot talk for all of the squadrons but I can talk for 7 Squadron, which was the resident operational squadron at Odiham, produced their own local orders, I will not say to bypass certain procedures, but because we were getting so many fault codes on the FADEC. Like any computer the FADEC system was subject to malfunctions when it had power interrupts. Because of the way, excuse me for going slightly technical, but it is necessary to explain this, the generators and the standby generator were arranged on the Chinook when you closed down and the standby generator came on there was a power interrupt on the system. It has probably been cured by now. The FADEC DECU, the Digital Electronic Control Units, had number codes on them and if it came up with 88 all was clear, the system was fine, but very often on shutdown, because of electrical interrupts, we came up with a whole variety of codes which meant technically you could not fly the aircraft until the technicians had a serious look at it That is what was laid down. One of the local orders was that if the aircrew got any codes other than 88 we were technically not allowed to fly, squadron ground crew would come out, pull two circuit breakers, push them back in again and hoped that cleared the faults. It was not a recognised procedure but the squadrons would use that. That did not lead to confidence! There was also a mechanical fault in one of the multi point connectors that went from the engines into the DECU, basically the electronic computers. The multi point connector was not of a good design, again you had power interrupts on the system. The squadrons introduced a procedure, probably the OCU did as well, but I am not certain on that point, where the crewmen every quarter of an hour would have to go up and check physically that this multi-point connector was not vibrating loose.

  678. Could any of these defects that you heard about or experienced—

  A. I experienced them as well

  679. —could they have resulted in a loss of control, even temporarily?

  A. If you have a power interruption to the computer, certainly. There were various safety systems built in but the FADEC is a computer like any other computer. It had a back-up system which was very largely independent but it did not always work and there were certainly recorded instances, I can give you the name of the pilot but I cannot recall the aircraft, I think there were two or three of them from memory, but I cannot be certain, when due to possible power interrupts the pilots lost control of what are called the engine condition levers, which were not throttles but performed something like a throttle. You had three positions to stop, ground idle on the ground and full power and you could lose control of those and disable them due to certain electronic problems. This certainly happened., I can give you the name of one of the pilots involved in that.