A High Court judge has dismissed a legal claim by families of those killed in the 1994 RAF Chinook crash against the Ministry of Defence, ruling that it was brought too late.

The Chinook HC-2 helicopter was on a flight from RAF Aldergrove in Northern Ireland to Fort George near Inverness when it crashed into the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland on 2 June 1994, killing all 29 people on board. The passengers were intelligence experts and the crew were from special forces.

The Chinook Justice Campaign, representing more than 55 relatives of 25 victims, argued that the ministry had an ongoing duty to set up an independent investigation into the crash. They raised concerns about the airworthiness of the aircraft, which had been delivered two days earlier after an upgrade programme. During the hearing, the High Court was told that the ministry was already suing Boeing over the upgrade before the crash and that tests had identified a high number of defects in a safety-critical engine control system. The campaign argued that no investigation had properly examined whether mechanical failure caused the crash.

The ministry opposed the challenge, saying it was brought too late and that a new investigation would not serve a practical purpose given the time that had passed and the lack of new evidence.

In his ruling, Mr Justice Butcher said the crash was a tragedy of immense proportions and that the families' pain remained bitter. However, he found that the claim could have been made from 2011 when the Mull of Kintyre review was published. That review overturned an earlier finding that blamed the pilots but did not determine the cause of the crash. The judge said no sufficient grounds had been shown to allow the case to proceed more than 14 years after that review.

Following the decision, Andy Tobias, whose father Lieutenant Colonel John Tobias was among the dead, said the families were disappointed but united in continuing to seek the truth. He called on the government to carry out a fresh review and for the principles of the newly approved Hillsborough Law to be extended to the Chinook families. The group's legal team is also considering taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights.