Aviation Mishap Story Time 10
The Worst is Yet to Come
[Ed. note - For better context, and better readership stats and views for my ego, you should probably read these prior pieces in this series: AMST Intro, AMST 1, AMST 2, AMST 3, AMST 4, AMST 5, AMST 6, Helicopter Parenting, AMST 7, AMST 8, and AMST 9.]
I. An Alpha, Omega, and Alpha…
Ron “Wiggy” Walkerwicz’s death on February 16, 1996, cast a pall over the deployment for me. That’s somewhat unfair because our deployment had ended some 5 months before - in September 1995 - but because that’s how I knew him, in my mind that deployment always has an asterisk on it. Rather than being a bad conclusion to 1995, however, Wiggy’s death was a harbinger of a terrible stretch of death that continued through 1996 and beyond for me.
The memorial service was about a week later, call it February 23, 1996 - a Friday. His not-quite widow was there and most of the discussion by the pilots’ wives centered around the unfairness that Wiggy’s fiancée would likely get nothing from the military because they weren’t married yet. People were discussing how to chip in and do something to support her. His best friend, another Harrier pilot from our deployment, gave the best eulogy I’ve ever seen - and, unfortunately, as this series illustrates - I’ve been to enough of them to have a pretty good sample from which to judge.
The following week I was back in my office where I worked as the squadron’s Quality Assurance Officer. Our task in Q/A was to act as the inspectors - and adjudicators - for whether maintenance was done correctly and to the tolerances required for high-performance aircraft. We were the final word in Maintenance certifying each aircraft “Safe for Flight.”I was a relatively junior Captain, but all of the senior mechanics on both the AH-1W and the UH-1N worked for me. (What this really means is that I worked for all of the senior mechanics and got to learn from them). In return for keeping me out of trouble, my job was to make sure that all of the other BS admin stuff that peacetime armies run on - fitness reports, leave papers, awards, etc. - was all done and didn’t interfere with them doing their jobs.
Friday, March 1, 1996, started like any other normal day. By then, I had applied for the Marine Corps’ funded law education program (FLEP) and consequently, I had become what was affectionately known in Maintenance as “the test bitch.”1 That meant my mornings were spent looking at what maintenance had been completed by the night crew and seeing which birds needed to get tested to support the day’s flight schedule. There were no tactical or training flights in my future, so my days were spent out on the ‘line.
I got called in from the flightline to come to Maintenance Control and the tone made it clear something was wrong. I got back into the hangar and someone told me that a Cobra had gone down in Georgia while on a flight back from the Bell plant in Texas. It wasn’t one of our aircraft, but we were being asked to support the mishap investigation by sending a couple of my folks to assist. Fine - get the paperwork done. Then I asked if anyone knew who was flying and there was a pause - “Squire” Edwards, a pilot in our sister squadron, HML/A-167…
My next door neighbor.
II. “Ding-dong! Grim Reaper.”
Okay, that’s not technically true, Squire, Sally, and his kids didn’t live right next to us in base housing - they were across the street. Our driveways faced each other such that if I backed out of mine and angled to the left I would back up into his driveway.
One of the great things about military life is base housing. It’s like living in a sitcom from the 1960s, like the Andy Griffith Show or Leave it to Beaver. Everyone knows each other: Why, there’s Mister Nelson and Old Man Witherspoon having lemonade on the porch! Except our military version was There’s the Group Commander going for a run in his green silkies while Stinky Prowse is hosting a water balloon fight for all the neighborhood kids! It was its own form of heaven… right up until the government sedan starts pulling up to people’s houses.
I can’t say that Squire and I were close in a deep, meaningful way, but over time, living across the street from each other, both with the exact same job, rank, roughly same age, kids the same age, etc… We would have those occasional “neighbor” conversations, where you see each other across the roof of your car going to work in the morning or coming home late afternoon, but because of all we shared in common, they were somehow more meaningful… to me anyway. I just liked the guy; I liked having him as a neighbor. If my kids kicked a ball into his yard, for example, I didn’t have to worry about my girls going to get it or whether Squire would be tweaked about it. Sometimes we would take their trashcans in if they were gone and they would do the same for us.2
That Friday afternoon when I drove down Longstaff Street into base housing, I could see his little boy sitting out on the stoop, waiting for his dad to come home and I felt sick. I could feel my stomach drop and my eyes tearing. I wasn’t sure if his wife had already been notified or not. Was his boy in denial or did he still genuinely believe his Dad was coming home from that trip? I trudged into my own house in silence, carrying a burden I did not want. I knew I couldn’t say anything to my own wife, either, not until I was certain that the “notification” was already done. I didn’t want the wives’ network to start a phone-tree of gossip when I didn’t really have answers to what had happened.
For the next few days, Squire’s little boy sat out on the stoop waiting for his dad - even after I was certain Sally had been notified. I did everything possible not to look as I drove in and out of housing each day. There has never been anything in the Universe that surpasses that boy’s earnest anticipation of his Father’s return.
III. Broken Yokes, Families, and Lawsuits
When I went into work the following weak the broken yoke and tail rotor assembly from Squire’s aircraft was in my office. One of my Staff NCOs had recovered it from the wreckage and now it was getting a more detailed analysis. Early indications were that somewhere over Georgia the aircraft had “lost” its tail-rotor, coming apart in the sky catastrophically - and instantly.
I could spend years writing about the tragedy of Squire Edwards’ death, its impact on HML/A-167, and on his family, but unfortunately none of my words are sufficient to change anything. Sally Edwards sued over the crash and lost in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
On March 1, 1996, Captain Edwards was killed when the Bell AH-1W helicopter that he flew as a Marine Corps pilot (the “Edwards Helicopter”) crashed near Columbus, Georgia. The crash was caused by the failure in flight of the craft’s “tail rotor yoke” (the “Yoke”). Mrs. Edwards filed this wrongful death action against Bell in the Northern District of West Virginia in February of 1998, asserting multiple theories of liability. Significantly, the parties agree that the Yoke failed from metal fatigue, resulting from an unduly low level of “compressive residual stresses” (“CRS”), which caused the Yoke to separate from the Edwards Helicopter. Although Bell designed and built its tail rotor yokes for a 2200-flight-hour service life, the Yoke failed after only 728 flight hours. In the Joint Pretrial Order, Mrs. Edwards asserted that “[t]he material fact at issue in the litigation is what caused the low level of CRS[ ] that enabled fatigue to set in and destroy the strength of the [Yoke] on [the Edwards Helicopter].”
Prior to trial, however, Bell was able to exclude evidence of prior yoke failures and modifications applicable to two models of its helicopters: the Bell 214ST and the AH-1W. “Bell moved to exclude from evidence all references to a modification that Bell had made in the design of the tail rotor yokes of its helicopters.” This modification resulted from a Bell study conducted following the 1987 crash of the 214ST. In 1992, after the conclusion of the study, the Bell Helicopter’s Safety Board noted that two types of Bell helicopters, the 214ST and the AH-1W - which used the same tail rotor yoke - “were vulnerable to CRS loss from unwitnessed static bending loads, possibly resulting from improper tie-down procedures for the tail rotor assembly. The Safety Board recommended to Bell’s engineering department that it redesign the tail rotor’s flapping stop on the 214ST helicopter…”
The Safety Board’s recommendation for installation of a YFS was limited to the Bell model 214ST helicopter. The Safety Board did not recommend installation of a YFS on Bell’s model AH-1W[.]
Sally Edwards and her children received nothing beyond whatever SGLI (serviceman’s group life insurance) or other life insurance Squire had, plus a modest death gratuity. I didn’t know it at the time, but I would become all-too-familiar with death benefits for Marines in the coming months and years.
It was supposed to be a “milk run” - pick up a refurbished bird from the Bell factory in Texas and enjoy the “new car smell” the whole flight home. So I raise a glass for Captain Robert Francis “Squire” Edwards - a Good man who loved his wife and two sons and was a damn good neighbor…
To Squire.
Because there was a chance I would get picked up for the program and eventually be leaving aviation, the squadron was not going to waste “tactical hops” - further training - on me.
In another of Wordsworth’s “unrember’d acts of kindness,” my next-door neighbor “Kid” Maney mowed my lawn every week for 6 months while I was on deployment, so that my wife never had to do it while I was gone. Bagged it and put it out for collection every week, too.