Zach Stubbings began flying Sea King helicopters for RAF Search and Rescue in January 2000, when he was 21 years old.
From day one, he loved the RAF, adored flying, was a natural pilot and was quickly promoted to trainer – one of his pupils was Prince William, whom he has described as ‘brilliant’ and ‘a top lad’.
Zach flew more than 2,500 hours in Sea Kings but, along with his colleagues, he struggled with the black, sooty fumes that billowed forward from the exhaust.
‘If you’re by the cargo door, the exhaust comes right through. Even worse, if you’re working on the winch, which I was, you’re putting your head right out into it,’ he says. ‘Sometimes the wind whipped it away, but mostly it pulled the fumes back so you got a face full and would be coughing and eyes streaming. And the smell!’
When they returned to base, their flying suits and bright yellow helmets were black with soot.
‘We had to clean everything. It didn’t feel right. There was no protection, nothing,’ says Zach. ‘We all complained about it.’
But no action was taken. No PPE was provided. No attempt made by the RAF to modify the exhaust system on Sea Kings, Wessex or, more recently, Puma and Chinook helicopters.
And this was despite the fact that documents and official reports clearly reveal that the Government knew about the dangers of the Sea King’s exhaust as far back as 1999. Instead, the Ministry of Defence continued to allow aircrew to fly in the helicopter, with no extra safety precautions, until it was decommissioned in 2018.
In 2013, Zach was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, cancer of the blood and bone marrow, which is a very unusual disease for a ferociously fit man in his early 30s. He was given ten years to live.
He put two and two together, did a lot of digging – ‘I had time on my hands,’ he says – and, at about that time, came across another pilot, Rich Sutton, now 53, who had flown more than 3,500 hours in Sea Kings and was also suffering with a very rare form of cancer (epithelioid fibrosarcoma) which caused tumours to keep cropping up throughout his body.
‘We got chatting over a cuppa in the crew room and thought, Well, that’s a bit odd,’ says Zach.
Three more colleagues got in touch. They were suffering from throat and lung cancers, despite never smoking.
And together they formed a WhatsApp group called Fly Hard, Fight Hard, with the motto, ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’.
‘We wanted to raise awareness. We were worried there’d be others and wanted to make sure they knew what could be coming for them.’
Sadly, he was right. Two of the original five passed away last year. But more people got in touch.
Some were pilots suffering from cancers such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, multiple myeloma, lung cancer, throat cancer and testicular cancer.
Others were family members of pilots who had been struck down with cancer in their prime. And all had flown more than 2,000 hours in either Chinook, Wessex, Puma or Sea King helicopters.
So far, an estimated 150 military personnel, from all three services and of all ranks (along with family members), have contacted solicitors about bringing actions against the RAF.
Louisa Donaghy, a senior associate at Hugh James solicitors, says they have already been contacted by at least 40 potential claimants. Others are being handled by Simpson Millar. Many, many more are expected.
But until recently, most thought they were alone.
Anna Irwin’s family had always assumed that her death – in October 2017, aged 38, from a rare form of lung cancer, despite never having smoked – was just horribly bad luck.
‘Anna loved the RAF. She was virtually married to it. We had no idea – I was always racking my brains asking, Why her? Why her?’, says her father Mick Irwin. ‘We are still reeling from the news that she was probably poisoned.’
Anna was the RAF’s golden girl. Since joining in 2003 she completed eight three-month tours in Afghanistan, met David Beckham – who was on a visit to perk up the troops – and served alongside Prince Harry.
‘She loved Harry, before he had his shenanigans and was a lot younger and more sensible,’ says Mick.
In 2013 she was presented with the Most Outstanding Airman award by the then Prince Charles for successfully fending off a group of Taliban troops trying to shoot down her Chinook helicopter, packed full of wounded troops.
She’d been a rising star from the start. Ambitious, energetic, immensely likeable, fantastically fit – just before she was diagnosed in 2017, after complaining of a nagging pain in her back, she had completed an Iron Man challenge and had applied to join the Special Services.
Over the years, she was exposed to more than 2,400 hours of emissions onboard Chinook helicopters.
‘She loved Chinooks and would sit on the ramp when they were flying. In the fumes,’ says Mick. ‘Sometimes I wish a bullet had taken her. She had taken that risk, not the risk of being bloody poisoned!’
Every day now, more potential claimants are coming forward – all with tales of heroic service and terrible suffering.
Squadron Leader Kai Macnaughton died on March 24, 2023, just three weeks after being diagnosed with a vanishingly rare type of blood vessel cancer.
‘He was a huge 6ft2 bear of a man,’ says his widow Claire. ‘A big dashing hero who burst into the room like Captain Flashman.’
A Specials Forces Chinook pilot who’d won the Sword of Honour at Cranwell, he served everywhere from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan and Iraq, before taking a desk job in 2013.
He had everything to live for. Two children, a glittering career, a wife who adored him.
‘We met on a blind date in Edinburgh in 1997,’ says Claire. ‘I was on crutches with a broken leg and when he scooped me up and kissed me it was love at first sight and that was that.’
His death 26 years later was dreadful.
‘It was really awful. It wasn’t like in the films. It was not peaceful. He did not die in his sleep and there were no last words,’ says Claire baldly.
‘He fought death right up until his last breath, but he wasn’t ready and he felt robbed. He’d been happy to go into combat and be shot at, because he felt in control. With the cancer he had no strategy. It was not a risk he had taken.’
When Kai died, Claire’s phone started ringing with calls from friends and colleagues.
‘They all came out of the woodwork. Oh yes, I’ve had cancer too. And me. And me! It was like, “I’m Spartacus!” At least seven close friends,’ she says. ‘But Kai was the first to go.’
It was at about the time Kai fell ill, in February 2023, that former RAF pilot Tim Hamilton, 53 – who had flown Wessex helicopters between 1996 and 2001 before becoming a commercial pilot – noticed a swelling in his leg.
Just after proposing to his girlfriend, he was told by a specialist that he had an incurable form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
So, like Zach, he started digging – researching the link between toxic fumes and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, until he was convinced there was a connection to his time in the Wessex.
He also contacted old friends and colleagues from his RAF days, and discovered that 34 of them had cancer, including the best man at his wedding.
The number of cases is disturbing, not least because the problem has been going on for so long. Earlier this month, The Times disclosed that troops flying RAF Sea King search-and-rescue helicopters raised their ‘genuine concern’ about exhaust inhalation more than 20 years ago.
More terrifying still is that the Ministry of Defence still seems to have its head in the sand; that nothing was done in response to the damning report back in the late 1990s. (In contrast, the German military, which discovered the risks at about the same time, installed longer exhausts on some aircraft to direct the fumes away). That it chose not to make the pilots aware. That, still now, nothing is being done.
So far, just five cases have been settled – brought by Zach, Rich and three others, two of whom have since died.
Initially the MoD tried to fob Zach off. But eventually it admitted liability in his case and his case alone – before backtracking and settling with the others on a ‘no fault’ basis.
Of course, military personnel are different to the rest of us: far, far tougher and extraordinarily resilient.
Even after she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, Anna threw herself into sponsored runs and climbs and raised more than £100,000 for children’s cancer charities.
She tried every treatment going – at the Royal Marsden in London, but also more experimental offerings in Belgium and Spain.
‘She fought like bloody hell,’ says her father. ‘She wanted to beat it. She didn’t want to die. She fought and fought. She wasn’t used to losing, but in the end, she had just nine months.’
She was in St Michael’s Hospice in Basingstoke when she received a letter from Prince Harry saying how sorry he was abut her predicament.
‘It was such a lovely letter. She was so pleased and it came in an embossed envelope,’ says her little sister Katie, now 38.
Mick can remember the moment his daughter finally gave up.
‘She said to me: “I’m sleeping 22 hours a day. What’s the point, Dad?”‘
Meanwhile, Rich Sutton, 53, is still fighting for survival after ten operations, two rounds of radiotherapy and a cycle of chemotherapy. His latest 12-hour operation, to remove a tumour the size of a melon from his neck, resulted in him having a stroke.
He joined the Navy when he was just 19 and, over the next 25 years, flew Sea Kings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Northern Ireland, was awarded the Queen’s commendation for bravery and became a commanding officer of 848 Naval Air Squadron.
Today he is unable to work, struggles to eat, is forever waiting for the next test result and, off the top of his head, knows ‘a dozen or so friends and colleagues with cancer’.
But for all that, he still eulogises his time in RAF and tells me that he cannot look up when he hears a plane going over because he misses flying so much.
That’s the other thing that sets these extraordinary pilots apart from the rest of us. They are loyal. They don’t like to complain, or rock the boat. There is a code – of discretion, duty, honour. And Zach says that when he started making allegations back in 2020, some colleagues thought he had breached it.
‘They blanked me. I got a lot of grief – people telling me I’d made it up, that I’d broken the code.’
David Sheppard, 53, flew Wessex and Sea Kings and Griffin helicopters between 1992 and 2019. He was diagnosed with tonsil cancer last summer but is now, happily, in remission. After making a couple of calls, he discovered that three of his former colleagues have the same cancer.
But he tells me that when he first spoke of suing the air force his father-in-law, who is also ex-military, was very much against it, saying: ‘It’s just not done. It’s not the sort of thing we do.’
Which is perhaps why, for so long, no one joined the dots – the poisonous fumes, the unusual cancers, and the grindingly painful deaths in such numbers.
Perhaps the RAF relied on this reticence. Maybe it helped that men don’t tend to discuss these things as much as women.
Certainly, Kai’s widow Claire feels like she’s banging her head against a brick wall.
‘Nothing has changed. Nothing. Same Chinook, same Wessex. Same poisonous fumes and no protection. And they’re being cowards and not even admitting that there is a problem,’ she says.
She doesn’t even expect the MoD to ground the Chinooks. She claims: ‘The reality is that it’s cheaper to give all these guys cancer and pay them off than fix the problem.’
But, like Rich and Zach, she wants pilots to be able to make an informed choice about the risks of their service – a luxury her Kai did not have.
And she wants the MoD to at least try to provide adequate protection – shutting the doors, wearing PPE – and set up a proper, structured compensation scheme.
The MoD said: ‘We continually review our policies to ensure they are aligned with good practice and protect our people from harm.
‘Service personnel and veterans who believe they have suffered ill health due to service, from April 6, 2005, have the existing and long-standing right to apply for no-fault compensation under the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme.’
They can be sure the claimants are going to keep on coming.
‘They’re in a cancer sausage machine,’ she says. ‘I just want people to stop dying.’
Sadly, that isn’t going to happen soon. Some are already ill. Some will become ill over the next few years. Meanwhile, I’m told that the Squadron Facebook pages are now very much feverish with talk of fumes and cancer and possible blood tests.
‘I know a lot of very anxious people,’ says Zach. ‘They are living with a cloud over them – they are ticking time bombs and they know it.’
And dare I ask, what about Prince William – is he likely to be at risk?
‘He was in a Sea King – different mark, but the same exhaust system,’ he says. ‘I’m not privy to his logbook. I know how many hours I flew with him, but I don’t know how many hours he flew in total. Or how much they had the door open; how much exposure he had. I am sure he has his own doctor,’ he says. ‘But like everyone else, he’ll just have to wait and see.’