On 2 September 2006, a Royal Air Force Hawker Siddeley Nimrod suffered an in-flight fire and subsequently crashed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing all fourteen crew members on board.

[1][2] At a ceremony held at Woodford airfield in Cheshire, the aircraft was handed over by the deputy managing director of Hawker Siddeley Aviation, Sir Harry Broadhurst.

[4] The aircraft is believed to have suffered a fuel leak or overflow during mid-air refuelling while it was monitoring a NATO offensive against Taliban insurgents west of Kandahar.

[7] On 23 May 2008 the assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire, Andrew Walker, handed down a narrative ruling that it had "never been airworthy from the first time it was released to the service nearly 40 years ago...

I have given the matter considerable thought and I see no alternative but to report to the secretary of state that the Nimrod fleet should not fly until the ALARP [as low as reasonably practicable] standards are met.

"[8] There had been concerns in the British media about serviceability of the Nimrod fleet[9] and bereaved families having to wait for years for the Oxfordshire coroner's office to hold inquests into military deaths.

[11] That aircraft suffered significant problems during development and construction which resulted in lengthy programme delays and the in-service date slipping nine years from 2003 to 2012.

The Board believed that the No 7 tank dry bay was the most likely location for the seat of the fire, with the most probable cause being escaped fuel having come into contact with a Supplementary Conditioning Pack (SCP) airpipe at 400 degrees Celsius "...after entering a gap between two types of insulation".

[21] On 23 May 2008, the coroner who led the inquest into these deaths stated that the entire Nimrod fleet had "never been airworthy from the first time it was released to service" and urged that it should be grounded.

There were failures...[in monitoring the aircraft's safety]...that should, if the information had been correctly recorded and acted upon, have led to the discovery of this design flaw within the Nimrod fleet.

The Times newspaper,[24] 31 May 2009, reported that all documents relating to the aircraft were immediately impounded but Sqn Ldr Guy Bazalgette, commander of the Nimrod detachment in the Gulf, managed to retrieve one file.

Also in May 2009, Charles Haddon-Cave, QC, leading the Nimrod Review issued a number of Salmon letters to organisations and senior RAF officers warning them they were likely to be criticised in its formal report.

[24] On 28 October, Haddon-Cave presented his report, summarised by the statement: Its [the Nimrod safety case produced by BAE Systems] production is a story of incompetence, complacency and cynicism.