Nimrod crash puts No 10 on spot

This will be another problem that Gordon will have to face up to (Of course he might do a Macavity) this week. As usual with any story these days involving the Clunker it's not good news and will bring the Armed Forces sharply back into focus for this disastorous Labour Government.

As the Sunday Times says

GOVERNMENT culpability in risking servicemen’s lives will be thrust to centre stage this week by the inquiry into the causes of the RAF Nimrod explosion over Afghanistan that killed all 14 on board.

There is intense government concern over Tuesday’s RAF board of inquiry report, which is likely to raise new doubts over Gordon Brown’s support for the armed services. The aircraft, which dates from the 1960s, was flying only because its replacement was delayed until 2010 to save money and a number of warnings about the risks were ignored.

The aircraft had a history of fuel leaks in the bomb bay, caused by pressure spikes in the air-to-air refuelling system.

The inquiry believes that the catastrophic explosion, west of Kandahar, was brought about by fuel leaking into the bomb bay, where it was ignited by hot air from a fractured pipe. That led the No 7 fuel tank at the base of the starboard wing to explode.

“The lack of safety equipment is a direct result of a culture of poor risk management that is endemic among senior officers and MoD officials and is largely driven by lack of funding.”

The MoD and senior RAF officers ignored repeated warnings of fuel leaks and fires on board the aircraft.

Jimmy Jones, a former RAF engineering officer who worked on the Nimrod trials, said: “If the MoD had acted on BAE Systems’ recommendations, those 14 crew members would still be alive today.”

In November 2004 a hot air pipe in the bomb bay of a Nimrod fractured as the craft came in to land at RAF Kinloss, Morayshire, blasting hot air onto the No 7 tank. An inquiry into that incident found the hot air would have been at least 50C above the spontaneous ignition point of the Nimrod’s Avtur fuel, which had begun to boil in the tank.

Disaster was averted only because the aircraft was on its way back to base. In his report on the incident, the station commander at Kinloss warned of more “unexpected failures” due to the aircraft’s age.

XV230 was one of a small number of Nimrods used to feed crucial live video of the battlefield direct to commanders in Afghanistan.

Nimrod’s air-to-air refuelling system was fitted as a quick fix in the 1982 Falklands conflict.

In March 2006 a report by QinetiQ, the defence consultants, blamed the Nimrod’s age and the “intense” way in which the aircraft were flown for what it described as a “critical” structural problem. The warning was ignored – with fatal results.

I have blogged on this and other problems with the over 40 year old Nimrod on a number of other occasions, most recently last month, when a similar Nimrod almost had the same fate and yet still had not had safety updates fitted.

Clunker Brown keeps trying to tell us he is "Honouring the Covenant" but he never actually shows us how. Honour to him means dropping colleagues into the doo-doo and then turning his back on them in the vain hope the problem disappears.

Nimrod crash puts No 10 on spot - Times Online