Aviation Mishap Story Time 11

Not Today, Satan!

Back to Where It Began

Shortly after Squire’s crash, our squadron got tasked with providing a test pilot - a post-maintenance functional check pilot - to go to MCAS Yuma, AZ, for the upcoming Weapons and Tactics Instructor (WTI) course. Given staffing at the squadron at the time, the Fates of Irony decided this would fall to me. This is the course I had been slated to attend as a student, but since - and because - I had put in my package for the Marine Corps’ Funded Legal Education Program (the FLEP)¹, the squadron couldn’t afford to use up tactical training, ammunition, et., on someone who might not be there if selected for the program - namely, Me. Absolutely no malice or hard feelings about that decision. I went to the CO a month or two earlier so that the squadron could find someone to replace me - to get those hours, flights and training - because the squadron needed a new generation of WTIs in order to remain capable of conducting its own training. One of my friends from deployment got tabbed for the slot instead.

In lieu of being a student, I would go test aircraft all day, every day, for ~5 weeks during the course, a kind of “Top Gun” for Marine helicopter pilots. Students fly in complex, demanding environments, almost all of it at night with live weapons and on night vision goggles. They break aircraft - a lot of aircraft. Maintenance would work on the birds at night and then a couple of us would come in in the morning to test up as many of those helicopters as we could with the daylight we had.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

My irony came with nostalgia, though. MCAS Yuma, AZ was where my Cobra career kinda got started, just shy of 3 years earlier, as a brand new First Lieutenant and student AH-1W RAC (Replacement Aircrew) at the training squadron, HMT-303. My first live shoots in a Cobra were at Yuma in ‘93. And, truth be told, it wasn’t a chore. I loved testing aircraft. It was hard but honest work, out on the flightline with the mechs trying to turn non-functioning helicopters into functioning, flyable ones for the next night’s operations. It was the ultimate in applied science, too, with your own ass as part of the wager. “Is that tail rotor really tracked and balanced correctly?”

Then, a CH-46 and a Harrier crashed in the desert within a week of each other. Le sigh.

March 27, 1996
Web posted at: 12:45 a.m. EST

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Marine Corps has ordered all "non-essential flight operations" halted for the next two days. The announcement came after the sixth crash of a Marine Corps aircraft in as many weeks, and the ninth this year.

The crashes have included three AV-8 Harrier “Jump-Jets,” an F/A-18D fighter jet, a Cobra attack helicopter [ed. note: this was Squire’s crash] and a CH-46 transport helicopter. The pilot of the Harrier jet that crashed on Monday ejected safely, and suffered only minor scrapes and bruises. However, five crew members have died in the five previous crashes.

The order to stand down came from Gen. Charles Krulak, the U.S. Marine Corps commandant, who said in a written statement it was an “attempt to identify and correct any discrepancies that may put Marine air crews and aircraft at unnecessary risk.” He said there was not yet any common cause apparent in the crashes.

The stand down is to take effect at all Marine Corps locations “no later than” midnight Tuesday and will last 48 hours. It affects both planes, including the Harriers, FA-18 Hornet fighters, EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes, KC- 130 refueling aircraft, and helicopters, including the CH-46 Sea Knights, CH-53 Super Stallions, AH-1 Super Cobras, and UH-1 Hueys.

The most recent crashes that led to the flight operations halt:

• February 16, 1996: AV-8 Harrier crashed at Cherry Point, North Carolina; one fatality.

• February 29, 1996: AV-8 Harrier crashed at Chocolate Mountain, California; no fatalities.

• March 1, 1996: Cobra Attack helicopter crashed near Columbus, Georgia; two fatalities.

• March 7, 1996: F/A-18D Hornet fighter jet crashed off the coast of South Carolina; two fatalities.

• March 19, 1996: CH-46E transport helicopter crashed near Yuma, Arizona; no fatalities.

• March 25, 1996: AV-8 Harrier crashed, again near Yuma, with no fatalities.

Reminder: It Can Always Get Worse

I’m kind of an outsider because I’m just there to support the Course; I don’t really “belong” to anyone. Consequently, I’ve got nothing else to do for the next two days - and my BOQ room is like a Motel 6 room - so I wander over to the building where the students and instructors are because Opie and the Wood Man (Mike Wood) are both students, so I figure I’ll check in with them and get lunch. All of the helo guys are joking because “we’re in a mandatory safety stand-down for 2 days because a(nother) Harrier went into the ground.”

For some reason - I have no idea why - CWO3 Michael Durant, U.S. Army, was there. I came in near the end of his talk during the “Safety Stand Down.” While it’s ancient history now, Warrant Officer Durant was the pilot of one of the two blackhawk helicopters involved in the Battle of Mogadishu. His H-60 Blackhawk was shot down during a raid, and he was eventually captured.

The image of American pilots and servicemen’s bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu was a significant cultural event at the time - at least it was for me and those of us who flew helicopters. I was in the training squadron when it happened and here I was not quite 3 years later listening to him talk about getting his tail rotor shot off by an RPG-7. After his talk, as part of our safety standdown, there were some smaller group discussions and I got dragged into the room that included Durant’s colleagues from the Army’s 160th SOAR, the NightStalkers, the pilots who fly aircraft for Delta Force and Spec Ops.

Some folks who knew I had been in a crash invited me to listen and share anything relevant. I had “crash cred,” as it were, but here’s a lesson: it’s always better to listen first, then speak second. While we’re in the room, I chatted up a few Army guys from the 160th and they all had multiple crashes to their resume. Cackling about it, too. They joked about “bending” a few aircraft in the same day because of the nature of their training and missions. It was a reminder of an important lesson: no matter how bad you’ve had it, if you’re still breathing air, there’s always someone who’s had it a LOT worse. I’d had one crash - and I hadn’t been dragged through the streets by an angry mob or held hostage by a Somali warlord. The glass is always half-full in my world because, believe me, the moment you dare to tell yourself that this current thing and moment is the end of your rope? The Universe will, as surely as shit rolls down hill, prove you wrong: it can always get worse… and frequently, it will.

Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Flying

After 48 hours, everybody looks at each other, shrugs, and we’re right back at it. I had started testing consistently with this same Sergeant, a very good mech - or he likely would not have been invited out, honestly - very conscientious, smart, and earnest Marine, in his early- to mid-20s... a few years younger than me. He had wife and a new baby and had just picked up E-5.

You fall into a rhythm and a bond develops after working on birds together. Silly things, mundane things, but they matter: breaking for lunch, natural stopping points in the testing process, grabbing something from the store so that we can skip chow and push through because we want to finish before ti gets any hotter, etc. He’s in the front seat for a lot of the testing, running different equipment from the front seat of the Cobra while I’m flying in the back. I let him fly us back to the airfield from the outlying areas once a test was finished - at least until we got back within controlled airspace and I needed to manage the radio calls at a place like MCAS Yuma, which sits right alongside Yuma International Airport and is within its airspace.

One day, late on a hot afternoon, we were working on the hydraulic servos for the controls - the control tubes sit just behind the pilot’s seat, running vertically, where there’s a small square metal plate, a deck, around the tubes. You can see it when the side panel is open if you look forward and up.

We were finishing up for the day, and now all that was left to do was do the ground checks, which took a few minutes, and then go out and do a series of flight control checks and hydraulics checks - maybe a 30 minute process in total. We’re flying out over the desert near the border of Mexico, which is not that far south from Yuma, doing the final maneuvers, nose up, nose down, angle of bank right and left, hydraulics on and hydraulics off - which is a little squirrelly, if I’m being honest - and right as I’m finishing up, the radio crackles and base/Maintenance announces:

“All aircraft - Return to base. Say again, all aircraft, RTB for Missing Tool.”

“Ohhhh, Noooooo!” I start in faux whine…

“…Some poor PFC left with a screwdriver in his flight suit.” The Sergeant finished for me. We chuckled because it didn’t happen too often, but it happened often enough - especially in really busy flight operations with people who don’t normally work together. Every single tool on a flightline is a controlled item - it has a tag, much be checked out, and checked back in, and accounted for. This is so that tools do not wind up mistakenly left in aircraft - which could be very bad.

99% of the time, however, when one of these gets called, it’s because some poor kid forgot a screwdriver in his pocket at the end of a shift and hopped in his car. If it happens on a Friday, it can be a drag because no one gets secured for liberty until every tool is accounted for - period.

We were done anyway, so I called back in acknowledging it. We were the furthest aircraft away, too, so we were the last ass-draggers to land and taxi back into the line.

The Sergeant popped the panels to check and make sure no hydraulic fluid leaks and I started climbing out to do a maintenance post-flight inspection to see how everything looked.

“Sir?” The Sergeant came around the side of the aircraft and he looked stricken. He was holding the missing screwdriver. “I don’t know what to say-”

I was stricken, too. Part of my responsibility was to be his backup and part of my own typical checklist included accounting for the tools. I had missed it.

“On the hydraulic deck,” I said more than asked.

He nodded.

It was bad.

That is exactly the kind of mistake that kills people and had in the past. It was something to be specifically guarded against, but somehow we missed it - both of us. If that screwdriver rolled or fell off of that little deck - where he had left it while working in there - it could have gotten jammed in the tubes and made us a smoking hole in the desert.

“I”ll take the hit,” I said. We both knew that it could cost him a stripe; it’s the kind of consequence that would not be unheard of under the circumstances. “Just tell them…” I didn’t want to ask him to lie, but I wanted to see if I could shield him from the consequences. “…Just give me the screwdriver and I’ll take it in.”

“Nossir- I mean, Sir. I- I appreciate that. But I’ll take care of it. It’ll be okay,” he reassured both of us.

The truth is I did not want to go in there with that missing tool - that had never happened to me in my 2 years of testing aircraft - but I also thought I could absorb, and rightfully deserved my share of, the professional opprobrium for having been “that guy” this time. This time the PFC with the tool in his pocket was Us.

I was back the next week testing and I didn’t hear anything more about it. The good news about that environment is that, in pretty short order, there’s the next thing that grabs the everyone’s attention and our dipshittery is instantly ancient history. The next week there was a bird strike; a buzzard went through Mike “the Wood Man” Wood’s aircraft and exploding in his and the instructor’s face. It was Mike’s second career birdstrike, so the mechanics put the buzzard’s leg on a charm and gave it to Mike as a gift.

I had to hitch a ride in the back of a Huey out to the site in the desert after they put in a new canopy, and did some other work on the aircraft. I think we had to ground turn it, then do some control checks, and fly it back to the airfield. I saw Mike at the club and enjoyed hearing the story over a beer at the Club. By late April we were back home at our squadron on the east coast and the comforts of home.

What could be better than that?

1. See MCO 1560.29E