A low-flying RAF C130 Hercules plane with ten military personnel on board flew into an ambush, set up by Iraqi insurgents on the ground, in ignorance of US intelligence that may have saved their lives.

All ten men were killed on January 30 when the Hercules was hit by ground fire and burst into flames, according to an official board of inquiry report published yesterday. It was the worst fatal casualty toll among British servicemen in Iraq from a single incident.

The barrage of ground fire coming from what was believed to be machineguns and shoulder-launched rockets caused a fuel tank to explode and the right wing was sheared off. The last radio message from the Hercules pilot at 1.30pm, only six minutes after taking off from Baghdad international airport, was: “No duff [this is for real], no duff, we are on fire, we are on fire.”

The crew, who had chosen the route carefully — a 40-mile journey from Baghdad to Balad — was never told that two American Black Hawk helicopters had come under fire on the same route that morning. The intelligence “does suggest that insurgents had prepared an ambush site, probably for helicopter traffic, and that XV179 [the aircraft’s tail number] flew close to it”, the board of inquiry report said.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Air Staff, said that intelligence was so “compartmentalised” for security reasons that there was no system under which all coalition partners in Iraq shared the same information.

Sir Jock did not lay the blame on the Americans for the failure to pass on the intelligence. It was just the way the system worked. He said that there was a huge amount of intelligence coming in all the time, and if it was passed to everyone, “they would have been overwhelmed”.

However, the board of inquiry gave as one of the reasons for the tragedy the fact that the crew had not been warned of the groundfire attacks on the helicopters earlier that day. The board’s report said: “The crew of XV179 remained unaware of the earlier attack and, once airborne, flew close to the Safire (surface-to-air) sites and crashed shortly afterwards.”

The report added: “It is not possible to prove that the earlier Safire and the loss of XV179 were linked; however, the fact that the aircraft took off without an accurate threat picture proves that the intelligence dissemination system needs urgent review.”

Based on the information they had, the experienced aircrew had decided to fly low all the way to Balad, a huge American logistics base, judging it to be less risky than climbing steeply on take-off, a period of flight recognised to be particularly vulnerable to enemy groundfire. But this tactic is also now being reviewed.

In a separate report on the board of inquiry’s findings, Air Vice-Marshal Iain McNicoll, Air Officer Commanding No 2 Group, highlighted the intelligence gap as one of the most pressing issues. “The need for operational security for some operations is well understood but, in air operations particularly, there is a need to ensure that compartmentalisation of information does not lead to elements of the force operating in ignorance of vital information,” he said.

The board of inquiry said other contributory factors included the lack of fire retarding technology, either foam or inert gas, in the fuel tanks which could have prevented an explosive fuel-air mix to develop. It recommended fitting a fire supression system to all Hercules fuel tanks; although Sir Jock disclosed that there had been more than 870 surface-to-air attacks on British and other coalition Hercules aircraft in Iraq from May 2000 to January 30 this year, and there had been no other fatal strikes.

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