The Nimrod Review - Official Documents

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Chapter 2 – History of the Nimrod Aircraft and Technical Description
now operating over land, rather than in its traditional maritime environment, was not significant as it continued
to fly within its cleared operational parameters. 27
Nimrods have been extremely successful in this new role. They have proved pivotal to the successful completion
of many missions and enabled risks to allied ground forces to be reduced significantly. Although the Nimrod
is no longer cleared to undertake AAR, limiting the time that it can provide support to ground forces, it has
continued to make a valuable contribution to current operations in theatre.
The combination of traditional and innovative roles means that the contribution that the Nimrod and its crews
makes to UK defence has, if anything, grown over recent years, despite the demise of the Soviet fleet. The
Nimrod platform contributes to a significant majority of British defence tasks and the Nimrod force will continue
to do so until replacement of the MR2 by the MRA4 (and in the case of the R1, the Rivet Joint Boeing 707
aircraft).
Conclusion
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The modification of the Comet design to create the Nimrod produced a unique and outstanding aircraft which
for many years had a rightful claim to be the world’s premier MPA. Throughout its 40-year life, the Nimrod has
very successfully and safely fulfilled a wide range of complex roles, including monitoring Soviet maritime activity
and, more recently, in support of land conflicts. The Nimrod has been a British success story. The Nimrod has
been, and remains, important to many aspects of British Defence.
How was it, therefore, that XV230 suffered a catastrophic failure on 2 September 2006 with the loss of 14 lives?
In this Report, I explain the manner in which the conditions for a major catastrophic accident can be created by
lurking weaknesses, errors and omissions sometimes set in train years apart. The history of the development of
the Nimrod from the Comet and its subsequent modification to the MR2 and fitting of AAR, show the insidious
manner in which several potential weaknesses can weave into a dangerous design over time. It is important to
analyse and understand how such individual weaknesses can coalesce and have unforeseen ramifications far
beyond their perceived significance when each is simply viewed in isolation.
The seeds of the disaster which befell the XV230 in September 2006 lay in the Nimrod’s design and modifications
decades before. I discuss this in detail in Chapters 4 to 6.
27 As mentioned earlier the Nimrod MR versions had a long history of operating in the Gulf prior to the more recent Gulf conflicts; a history stretching
back to its predecessor, the Shackleton. The Nimrod R has a similar history and has operated in the Gulf for considerable periods during and since the
first Gulf conflict.
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