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When Britain signed a deal with Boeing in the mid-1990s to buy eight Chinook Mk3 helicopters, the Gulf War was a distant memory and Afghanistan was mired in containable internal disputes.
The Government had no pressing military need for combat helicopters and Ministry of Defence officials, so the story goes, failed to ask Boeing to include within the contract the software codes for the complex avionics systems.
Once the omission was realised the manufacturer, it was said, then refused to hand over the codes, claiming that it would be a breach of the company’s intellectual property rights.