MoD asks Chinook crash families to help find its own paperwork ahead of official parliamentary report – actions described as “utterly bizarre”
8 Sept 2026
Widows of those killed in the Chinook disaster on the Mull of Kintyre have issued a fresh appeal to Prime Minister Andy Burnham to meet them and order an independent review, as he reaches the halfway point of his first 100 days in office.
On Tuesday, 50 days will have passed since Mr Burnham became Prime Minister, leaving him 50 days to honour the families' request to meet them within his first 100 days.
The appeal comes just days after Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Neilly and Detective Superintendent Philip George Davidson, of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, both killed in the crash, received posthumous honours - two of 39 public servants to receive the Elizabeth Emblem.
Announcing the awards, the Prime Minister said families who had received “the worst news” had “carried it every day since”, adding: “we recognise what these families gave and that we will never let it be forgotten.”
The Chinook widows say there could scarcely be a more poignant moment for Mr Burnham to meet them and hear directly why, 32 years on, they are still fighting for answers.
Their appeal comes as correspondence reveals the extraordinary scale of work the Ministry of Defence is still carrying out to answer fundamental questions about the airworthiness of Chinook ZD576 and the circumstances in which it was allowed to fly.
Twenty-nine people were killed in the crash on June 2nd 1994, including 25 of Britain's most senior intelligence experts and four special forces crew.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, the widows state: “We are deeply concerned that the MOD intends to publish its findings in Parliament without any independent scrutiny. A report produced by the MOD, based in part on correspondence with the families, cannot provide the independent assurance or public confidence that this case requires.
“If Ministers and Parliament cannot always rely on the information provided by the MOD, how can the MOD's own conclusions about the Chinook crash simply be accepted as authoritative?
“The MOD cannot be allowed to mark its own homework.”
The new Defence Secretary Wes Streeting has told the families he expects to report to Parliament by the end of September on answers to just 20 of the 225 unanswered questions posed by the campaign.
But correspondence sent to the campaign in June and July shows officials were still searching for the answers. By 10 July, approximately 280 files had been recalled from the central MoD archive, around 220 examined and indexed, with another 110 on order.
Officials said “many thousands of paper documents are being examined”, that they were continuing to investigate airworthiness issues and intended to examine aircraft technical documentation and contractor issues “in more detail”.
Bizarrely, they have also repeatedly asked the families themselves to identify documents and sources to assist the Department's research.
Yet the MoD had already refused the families' request for an independent inquiry and subsequently opposed their attempt to secure one through the High Court, where Government lawyers argued the families were “out of time”.
The correspondence also reveals what the families say is a fundamental flaw in the Department's approach to airworthiness.
In June, officials told the campaign that despite conducting a “thorough search” they had not located any document “stating that the Chinook HC-2 was unairworthy” and subsequently asked the campaign to identify “which document(s) the FADEC was declared ‘unairworthy’”.
The families say that this fundamentally misunderstands their case and the concept of airworthiness. They are not suggesting there must be a single MoD document declaring “THIS AIRCRAFT IS UNAIRWORTHY”.
Their case is that the documentary evidence, taken together, demonstrates unresolved safety and airworthiness problems which should have prevented the aircraft from being released into operational service without those problems being resolved.
That evidence includes contemporaneous Boscombe Down material concerning FADEC and the suspension of further Chinook HC2 trials flying. The recent High Court judgment itself records a Boscombe Down communication dated the day of the crash stating “in strong terms that the HC2 should not be flown”.
Susan Phoenix, whose husband Ian was killed in the crash, said: “Prime Minister, we have waited for more than 32 years. We are not asking you to decide what happened to the aircraft. We are asking you to meet us, listen to us and allow the evidence to be examined independently.
“Half of your first 100 days have now passed. Please don't make us spend the next 50 wondering whether you will listen to families who have already waited for far too long.
“We should not now be helping the Ministry of Defence search its own archives to find the answers when a fresh independent review has been refused.
“The Prime Minister has just said that families like ours carry their loss every day and that their sacrifice must never be forgotten. We welcome those words. Now we are asking him to sit down with us and listen. There could not be a more appropriate time.”
Gaynor Tobias, whose husband John was killed, said: “There is something fundamentally wrong, and utterly bizarre, when the Ministry of Defence can refuse an independent inquiry, fight families in court to prevent one, and at the same time admit that it is still searching hundreds of files and investigating the very airworthiness questions we have been raising.
“How could the MoD be confident that no independent investigation was necessary when it had not finished finding and examining the documents needed to answer our questions?
“This is why the MoD cannot be allowed to mark its own homework. Whatever report it now produces for Parliament will have been written by the institution whose decisions and actions are themselves in question and have been for 32 years.”
The MoD's continuing search also, the widows say, sits uneasily with the Government's position in the families' recent judicial review. The High Court concluded that only limited additional material had emerged, yet the Department's own correspondence shows officials examining hundreds of archived files and thousands of pages of material to answer the families' questions.
The disclosures also come amid renewed questions about the MoD's treatment of historic evidence.
Former veterans minister Tobias Ellwood last week accused the Department of deliberately withholding medical records of Cold War nuclear test veterans, telling BBC Newsnight it amounted to “an absolute cover-up”.
Sir Liam Fox, the former Defence Secretary who commissioned the 2011 Mull of Kintyre Review which finally cleared the pilots, has also called for a fresh review after examining evidence assembled by the campaign.
He has raised concerns with Mr Burnham – and his predecessor Sir Keir Starmer - that vital information may have been withheld from ministers and Parliament.
Shan Gregory-Smith, whose husband Richard was killed, said: “The MoD cannot have it both ways. It cannot tell families there is nothing sufficiently new to justify an independent investigation while simultaneously retrieving hundreds of files, examining thousands of pages and asking us to help its officials find the evidence needed to answer basic questions about airworthiness.
“Searching its archive for a document containing the word ‘unairworthy’ misses the point spectacularly. The question is what the evidence shows about whether this aircraft met the requirements necessary for it to be safely released to service.
“Andy Burnham has spent years campaigning against institutions investigating themselves, withholding information and forcing bereaved families to fight for answers. He now has 50 days left to show that those principles apply to the Chinook families too.
“Meet us. Look at the evidence. And take the investigation out of the hands of the Ministry of Defence.”
The Chinook Justice Campaign is seeking an independent review of the circumstances in which the aircraft was authorised to fly, including the airworthiness evidence available at the time and the information subsequently provided to inquiries, ministers and Parliament.