A total of 36 witnesses were called by the Crown to give evidence during the inquiry and two witnesses were called by the Tapper family. No witnesses were called by any of the other parties. Ten of the witnesses whose evidence I refer to in the course of this Note were members of Her Majesty's armed forces and (with one exception early on in the inquiry) a request was made by the court to the representatives of the media that their names should not be published. To protect the identity of these witnesses in this Note I shall refer to each of them simply by a capital letter, and to assist those who have access to the notes of evidence to identify them I append the day and page number on which each of these witnesses began to give evidence:

  I am happy to record that I had no doubts about the honesty of any of the witnesses who gave evidence during the inquiry and my determination has not turned to any extent on issues of credibility. Likewise there was nothing in the demeanour in court of any of the witnesses to suggest that their evidence could not be relied upon. For present purposes I think it is necessary only to comment upon three of the witnesses, namely H, J and K.

  H was the President of the RAF Board of Inquiry which investigated the circumstances of the accident and prepared a report thereon a copy of which, with all its exhibits and annexes, was lodged as a production for the Crown.

  Only certain parts of the report, exhibits and annexes were referred to in the evidence before this inquiry. But they were enough to demonstrate the depth and breadth of the Board of Inquiry's investigations for which I dare say there can be nothing but admiration. H himself was a very experienced helicopter pilot with some 2,000 flying hours in Wessex helicopters and over 2,000 hours in Chinook MkI helicopters. With his two colleagues, he had evidently devoted much careful and anxious consideration to the task of enquiring into the cause or causes of the accident. In the witness box too he was an impressive witness and his conclusions plainly deserve to be given a great deal of weight. But that does not mean to say that this court is obliged to accept them uncritically in particular when there are, as I shall hope to demonstrate, cogent reasons in the evidence as a whole for believing that they should not be accepted.

  J was the first of the two witnesses called by the Tapper family. It was submitted that he had expressed his opinion on the accident against the background of virtually no preparation and no detailed consideration of the relevant facts and circumstances and that his views should be assessed in that context. I accept that there is some force in this submission, but at the same time J was also an experienced Chinook pilot qualified in both the MkI and MkII models and with about 2,500 flying hours altogether in both. He was also well qualified to speak on the subject of the RAF Special Forces Flight, and I saw no reason to doubt his evidence in particular when he spoke of this and also on certain matters of practice and procedure in relation to the flying of Chinook helicopters as they applied to the circumstances of this accident.

  Apart from the fact that H had to be recalled to respond to K's dual control jam theory, K (who was called on behalf of the Tapper family) was the last witness to give evidence at the inquiry. He had by then had the advantage not enjoyed by any of the other witnesses of having sat through the whole inquiry and heard the evidence as it unfolded. Counsel for the Ministry of Defence, the remaining families and Boeing Helicopters all submitted that his evidence lacked the objectivity which had characterised H's evidence and that this lack of objectivity had impaired K's ability to assess the evidence that he had heard dispassionately. These submissions came as no surprise to me for it was plain that K had been a close friend of Flt Lt Tapper and felt that he had been unjustly treated by the RAF authorities. But I had the advantage of being able to watch K very carefully while he was at the witness stand and I have to say that I was favourably impressed by the candid, thoughtful and articulate manner in which he gave his evidence. He made no attempt to disguise his friendship with Flt Lt Tapper nor the sense of injustice which he evidently felt (along apparently with many others in the Royal Air Force) at the way Flt Lt Tapper and Flt Lt Cook had been accused of gross negligence by certain senior RAF officers. And there were times when he could easily have exaggerated his evidence had he been minded to do so. For example, given the amount of time that was devoted during the inquiry to the subject of spurious "engine fail" captions and incomplete Flight Reference Cards, he might well have said that the cause of the accident could have been the appearance of such a caption. But he made it clear that he did not think that this had been the case. It is true that he initially appeared rather to overstate the likelihood of his dual control jam theory being the explanation for the accident, but it was I thought significant that this was first elicited from him, not during examination in chief by counsel for the Tapper family, but during cross-examination by counsel for the Ministry of Defence and that when he first introduced the theory it was as "one of a number if you like which are potential explanations". It was only after introducing the theory in this way that he agreed with counsel that this was the most probable explanation (and it is noticeable that at that stage the word "probable" was not used by K but only by counsel). This all happened late in the afternoon of the fifteenth day and early the following morning K made his position in regard to this theory quite clear when he was asked: "Question—I thought you had satisfied yourself in your own mind as to what the cause of the crash was? Answer—Absolutely not. It is just another possibility, which fits in with all the parameters. Q.—So you detract your earlier evidence that this was the most probable cause of the accident? A.—I think I said it was a possible cause. Q.—I think you agreed with me when I put it to you that your position was that this was the probable cause of the accident? A.—In that case I detract that". Plainly there were a number of difficulties about K's theory and at the end of the day I certainly do not think that it is more likely than the conclusion reached by the Board of Inquiry. But it does not follow from this that all his evidence should be rejected, and in particular the evidence which he gave as to the likelihood of the Board of Inquiry's conclusion being correct. The fact of the matter was that K was himself an experienced Chinook pilot with approximately 1,900 flying hours in the MkI model and 600 hours in the MkII, and as he pointed out his motivation was not entirely based on a feeling (which may after all be entirely justified) of the injustice done to Flt Lt Tapper and Flt Lt Cook but also on a desire to get to the root of the accident. As he put it: "It does nobody in the Air Force, particularly flying Chinooks, any good to have this crash unsolved". Besides, much of what he said in the course of his evidence did not differ materially from what had been said by many of the Crown witnesses. On the whole I have tried to illustrate my reasons for rejecting the Board of Inquiry's conclusion by reference to the evidence of these witnesses rather than K, but I have had very little hesitation in relying at certain points on evidence which he alone gave.

  Since the evidence has all been recorded I have thought it best in what follows to let the witnesses speak for themselves rather than attempt to paraphrase their evidence. And, lest there be any doubt about the matter, unless otherwise indicated I have accepted all the evidence which is rehearsed in this Note with the exception of the evidence of H as to the cause of the accident in section VII(a).