Starmer Agrees to Meet Chinook Crash Families After 30-Year Fight

Sir Keir Starmer’s agreement to meet the families of those killed in the Chinook ZD576 crash has reopened one of the RAF’s longest-running controversies at the highest political level. For relatives who have spent 30 years pressing for answers, the meeting was a significant and long overdue step toward the accountability, disclosure and fresh review they say have been denied for far too long.

The crash took place on 2 June 1994 on the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, when the RAF Chinook went down in fog while travelling from RAF Aldergrove in Northern Ireland to Fort George near Inverness. All 29 people on board were killed. The dead included four RAF crew members and 25 military and intelligence personnel, among them MI5 officers, Royal Ulster Constabulary officers and British Army personnel. The loss remains the RAF’s worst peacetime accident.

What has kept the case alive is not only the scale of the tragedy, but the fight over responsibility. An RAF board of inquiry initially blamed the two pilots for gross negligence, a finding that later became the centre of a fierce campaign by bereaved families and supporters who argued that the men could not answer for themselves and that the process had denied them justice. In 2011, an independent review set aside the gross negligence finding and apologised to the pilots’ families, saying the cause of the accident would likely never be known.

That conclusion has never satisfied campaigners. The Chinook Justice Campaign and family members have continued to call for a judge-led public inquiry and the release of sealed documents, arguing that only full disclosure can resolve the many unanswered questions surrounding the aircraft, its mission and the decisions made after the crash. They say the case still resonates because the original blame placed on the pilots shaped public understanding for years, while the later review acknowledged that the evidence did not support that judgment.

The Ministry of Defence has said the crash has already been through six inquiries and investigations, including the independent judge-led review. But the families see Starmer’s willingness to meet them as a chance to force the issue back into the open and test whether a decades-old military controversy can finally be reconsidered with the authority they have sought since 1994.