Educated at Chatham House Grammar School in Ramsgate, Wratten entered RAF Cranwell and was commissioned into the Royal Air Force in 1960.
[1] In June 1982 he was made the first Station Commander at RAF Stanley in the Falkland Islands after the 1982 war.
[2] In 1995, following the Chinook Helicopter Crash on the Mull of Kintyre, Wratten was the Senior Reviewing Officer of the Board of Inquiry which had failed to find a cause of the accident.
Despite a lack of Accident Data Recorder and cockpit voice recorder, Wratten concluded that because the aircraft hit the ground whilst in cloud/fog, pilot error was the cause of the crash and found the pilots guilty of gross negligence.
[3] Following a subsequent Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry and House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report, a House of Lords Select Committee was appointed to consider all the circumstances surrounding the crash and unanimously concluded "that the reviewing officers were not justified in finding that negligence on the part of the pilots caused the aircraft to crash".