Aviation Mishap Story Time: Introduction
I've Got More Than a Few of These. Settle In.
There I was… in the Ready Room
When I was a youngling wanna-be pilot in the post-Top Gun Era of the early ‘90s, there was a military aviation magazine called “Approach” that populated all of the Ready Rooms where we wannabes sat and waited - (and waited…)1 for our 1 hour brief with our instructor before we were allowed to go pre-flight and fly. “Approach” is the Naval Aviation Safety Center’s official mag and it has one of the best publication “pitch” descriptions in history, in my opinion. Check this out:
Since 1955 Approach magazine has guided Navy2 and Marine Corps aviation professionals with information, statistics and a bit of humor. Most of all, Approach has given aviators a place to share stories, misdeeds and adventures, to make us better, safer and more effective.
These first-person “There I was” stories have been the basis for Approach since its inception. This sharing of stories also has bonded naval aviators - past and present - to one another and to the profession itself. Picture yourself with a damaged aircraft, operating in blue water with a pitching deck and enough gas for one, maybe two, approaches, and you have everything needed for a “There I was” story.
To view an Approach issue, click the PDF link. If you prefer the online version, click the Flipbook link.
Approach Magazine was so pervasive in Naval Aviation that some of the articles would begin with an intro that read something like this: “I’m writing this because my CO told me to in order to inform the broader Community…” which was the most Catholic thing ever: simultaneously equal parts confession and penitence for the sinner, the CO assigned the article as a lesson for EVERYONE - writer and reader alike. Some of the pieces would even be “anonymized” to protect the stupid, the innocent… the CO from possible adverse consequences. I would encourage any of my readers to go to the website and click on a few articles and read through - they’re not that long - just to get a flavor and feel for the reality of military aviation generally, and Naval Aviation, specifically.
There is a lot of jargon, but like Shakespeare with Elizabethan English, if you just give yourself time - be patient - you’ll eventually get the gist through osmosis. It only takes a few articles to pick up some of the terms in context. In short order, you’ll be amazed at what you’re reading.
Some critical points to understand:
Naval Aviation has always been a profession with a rich oral tradition - a storyteller’s dream, largely because…
…Aviation is risky; military aviation is downright dangerous. Naval aviation is so f**ing deadly3 that I almost can’t believe I did it in retrospect. I saw and know far more people killed in training than I do from combat, for whatever that’s worth. It’s been more than 27 years since I last piloted a tactical aircraft in “the Fleet” and yet a large part of the 900+ hours I spent flying are seared into me;
Because of all of the control, communication, and coordination necessary for military aviation to operate: radar, black boxes (for fixed wing), recording devices, safety programs, etc., there is usually opportunity for pretty good reconstruction/deconstruction when it goes bad - and it does go bad;
There was (is?) a tradition that safety investigations are protected - and distinct - from any possible criminal repercussions, so that we can have open dialogue about what happened or went wrong to ensure people don’t get killed down the road as a result of some of the unique circumstances of operating tactical aircraft at sea.4
A Diversion Where I Investigate the Psychopathy of Military Aviation
Before we get into any of my own “Approach”-style There I was fables, I think it’s important to ruminate not specifically on the 4 points above, but to briefly discuss the psychology of military aviation because there is a dark side here, too. You don’t want a magazine to glorify military aviators doing stupid shit (“misdeeds”) and then chortling about it afterwards - because some of the most epic disasters in aviation have involved military aviators doing insanely stupid shit, chortling about it, and then later doing “But wait, there’s more!” insanely stupid shit, and then killing themselves and others.
Arguably, the most famous one of these is Bud Holland and the Fairchild Air Force Base crash of 1994, about 2 years after I first started flying.
Like any number of avoidable mishaps, the post-mortem never paints a pretty picture. Perhaps worse, it paints a picture that shows people letting an obviously out-of-control aviator get away with increasingly dangerous acts to the point that it looks almost as if dude had a death wish and no one was willing to intervene.
To wit:
The accident board stated that Lt. Col. Holland's macho, daredevil personality significantly influenced the crash sequence. USAF personnel testified that Holland had developed a reputation as an aggressive pilot who often broke flight-safety and other rules. The rule-breaking included flying below minimum-clearance altitudes and exceeding bank-angle limitations and climb rates.[9]
An earlier incident occurred in 1991 when a B-52 piloted by Holland performed a circle above a softball game in which Holland's daughter was participating. Beginning at 2,500 feet (760 m) AGL, Holland's aircraft executed the circle at 65° of bank. In a maneuver described by one witness as a “death spiral”, the nose of the aircraft continued to drop and the bank angle increased to 80°. After losing 1,000 feet (300 m) of altitude, Holland regained control of the aircraft. Holland also regularly and illegally parked his car in a “no parking” zone near the base headquarters building.[2][10]
During a 19 May 1991 air show at Fairchild, Holland was the command pilot of the B-52 aerial-demonstration flight. During the demonstration, Holland’s aircraft violated several safety regulations, including exceeding bank and pitch limits, flying directly over the air-show spectators, and possibly violating altitude restrictions. The wing staff observed the demonstration, but apparently took no action.[11]
On 12 July 1991, Holland commanded a B-52 for a flyover during a change-of-command ceremony for the 325th Bomb Squadron at Fairchild. During both the practice and the actual flyover, Holland’s aircraft flew at altitudes below 100 feet (30 m) – well below the established minimum altitude – flew steeply banked turns in excess of 45°, exceeded pitch-angle limits, and executed a wingover. The wingover was not specifically prohibited but was not recommended, because it could damage the aircraft. After witnessing the flyover, the wing commander Colonel Arne Weinman and his deputy commander for operations (DO), Colonel Arnold Julich, verbally reprimanded Holland, but took no formal action.[12]
It only gets worse as you continue reading further, but you should read on.
So… What Does It Mean?
It is far too easy to dismiss these kinds of incidents as the actions of one rogue aviator and then we all go back to what we’re doing and act like there’s not something else - something deeper - going on here. It reminds me so much of what happens in the case of a “rogue” cop that kills or gets caught abusing a citizen on video. When narrative control, lying, and excuses don’t work, the “rogue” cop inevitably gets portrayed as the exception (and definitely not the rule!) and then swept under the rug. And we all go on pretending there isn’t something more going on with the profession.
For a moment, though, I’m going to provide a slightly different, competing perspective of Bud Holland. Here is an article written on the 20 year anniversary of the crash by Bud Holland’s neighbor’s son who lived right next door to the Hollands in base housing.
He [Holland] was always nice to us boys – nicer than I would be raising teenage girls – and I remember thinking how much he reminded me of Chuck Yeager. Well, the Chuck Yeager character played by Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff.
He was also the caretaker of the community pool nearly in our backyard. We, along with the Hollands, were closer in proximity to the pool than any other of the neighbors on the three streets that utilized it, and we often felt like it was ours. There were many evenings we’d be eating dinner in the sunroom and could see Bud closing up the pool for the evening. When I was old enough, I took a part-time job closing up the pool as well and it was Bud who showed me how to do everything…check the PH levels and add chemicals when necessary, scoop the dead bugs and leaves out, pull the cover over the pool and reel it back up again in the morning. He really seemed like a nice guy and a good dad.
(My emphasis added). This hardly sounds like a guy who is “out of control” or has a death wish through the eyes of a young man who lived right next door for years and grew up with Bud Holland’s daughters. So which of these two portraits of Bud Holland is the correct one? Was Bud Holland a flying madman or a kind father and neighbor? The answer is, of course, that there is no dichotomy here: one is not ‘correct’ and the other ‘incorrect.’ Both of these portrayals capture some essence of Bud Holland’s character.
But when it comes to flying tactical aircraft, you can bet that if you crash one, they’re even going to hold the fact that you parked in the General’s parking spot against you later on. If you missed it the second paragraph above, here it is in all of its glory:
Holland also regularly and illegally parked his car in a "no parking" zone near the base headquarters building.
Quelle horreur!! I mean, talk about piling on a dead guy. With all of the other, flagrant aviation rule-breaking that one could point to as being indicative of unsuitability for flying B-52s, the fact that they had to mention his parking in the “no parking” zone near Base HQ seems, well… it seems more than just petty. That part, along with this “The accident board stated that Lt. Col. Holland's macho, daredevil personality significantly influenced…” again reminds me of when a bad cop needs to be demonized so that the rest of the Boys in Blue can go on with a clear conscience. It’s whistling while walking past the graveyard in hopes that the evil spirits can be kept away with the happy noise.
The last thing anyone in the Air Force, or military aviation more broadly, wants to dig into is how the military selects, trains for - and even lionizes - those exact same risk-taking (i.e. “macho, daredevil”) personality traits in order to produce aviators who will fly in what would otherwise amount to insane conditions as a matter of course. For anyone who hasn’t seen the recent movie “Devotion” - and apparently almost no one did - it’s based upon the true story of (Adm.) Tom Hudner, who won the Medal of Honor for intentionally crashing his own plane to try to save his friend and squadronmate, Jesse Brown, one of the first black naval aviators, shot down during a mission in the Korean War. I met Admiral Hudner on multiple occasions as a young midshipman (he passed in 2017) and at every event, he was lauded by veterans for his daring and defiance of orders to try to save his friend. So… defying orders and busting up aircraft is evidently acceptable behavior under some circumstances.
I have previously written about the process5 by which we teach ordinary high school students to become killers through something known as boot camp, but then the government disclaims any responsibility when the occasional rando embraces their new-found comfort with sociopathy or psychopathy and acts it out on the local populace.
“WE ONLY WANTED YOU TO KILL THE ENEMY!” they scream (quietly to themselves) after the fact.
“WE ONLY WANTED MACHO, DAREDEVILS WHO… OPERATE WITHIN SOME RULES… UNLESS THEY CAN BE MADE INTO ICONS FOR RECRUITING!!” they never say out loud after an aviation mishap.
I want to be unequivocal that I’m not trying to justify what Bud Holland did. The vast majority of military aviators do NOT do this kind of stuff… HOWEVER, what I do want to point out is that all of the sturm und drang afterwards by higher-ups - who knew exactly what Bud Holland was like - and all of the “New Procedures” implemented to prevent exactly this type of thing from happening in the future are largely the same whistling past the graveyard. Bud Holland is, and was, by no means the only one of these kinds of incidents. There have been MANY of them, in both civil and military aviation. There’s a long-standing joke at flight school that the last thing some unfortunate student gets to hear is an instructor taking the controls and then saying, “Lemme show you this. I used to do this in the Fleet all the time…”6
Having lived through my military aviation tour and seen some insane shit - even when everyone is operating by the rules - I’m here to tell you all that you can’t ask people to do what we ask them to do in military aviation and then simultaneously think you’re not going to get the occasional Bud Holland. It’s like there always being some number of car drivers who wind up wrapped around a telephone pole in their Porsche Cayenne at 3:30 in the morning with a BAC somewhere north of pickled; or some number of rock stars, actors, or comedians OD’ing or drowning in their own vomit; or some percentage of cops beating on suspects, prostitutes, or their spouses; or some number of Marines getting in bar fights when they shouldn’t. Let’s not pretend that we’re surprised or that this is just something that can be fixed with better “procedures.”
…Or maybe this is just me setting the reader up to help justify some of the things I’ve been involved in before confessional starts… but I don’t think so.
This is a good enough stopping point before I begin telling tales in earnest, but next time, I’ll explain the origins of the picture of Yours Truly at the top from 11 Aug 1994, less than 60 days after Bud Holland’s crash.
… and waited.
In this the Era of Inclusivity, I would like to note that the Coast Guard is considered a part of “Navy” aviation referenced in the quote. Our Coastie brethren and sestren train alongside us in P’Cola, F-L-A, and then at NAS Whiting Field for helicopter training. They also do incredibly difficult flying in “the Fleet” in storms and at sea in their SAR (Search and Rescue) missions, and they do it without any of the chest-thumping we do/did in the military.
That linked wiki-list contains all “aviation mishaps involving military aircraft” and is therefore a big set than I’m looking for, but (a) I can’t find the list I’m looking for in any of my bookmarks, and (b) my DDG and Google-fu are weak right now. This list will do, however, because it has mine and some others that I want to talk about on the list.
I don’t know if #4 is still the case because I’ve left the profession, but it felt to me that the 90s and Aughts may have seen much more legalism creep in and pilots started getting wings pulled over things that would previously have been viewed as merely a one-time lapse in judgment.
I’ve already written about the process of acculturation, how ordinary HS students get turned into killers, and how maybe we’ve all got some of that darkness within us.
I’ve got a few of those stories in detail coming down the road.