T-38C Fatal Mishap…

Any additional info?

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/11/20/air-force-1-pilot-killed-2-injured-crash-involving-2-jet-trainers-laughlin-afb.html

Brief article makes it sound like a ground mishap. Maybe a formation takeoff or landing incident. AETC mishaps are REALLY rare. Sucks. RIP.

 

I would differ on the AETC mishaps being rare, dunno the statistics compared to other MAJCOMs but there are plenty of incidents that come to mind from recent years.

There were some pictures that made it out onto social media of this accident scene but got yanked down pretty quick. Yeah, it was something like you guessed.

 

I thought they stopped doing form takeoff and landings.

 

Oh? Maybe. News to me…

 

You are correct. I should have been more specific. SUPT mishap rates are very low. They mirror those of the multi-crew Air Force. ACC rates are always the highest; even with FTU losses, which make up the bulk of AETC Class As. When I was the F-16 pilot-physician assigned to AETC for a while I was involved in 7 Class A investigations in 13 months.

 

Will- Wonder if the rate is higher or lower for FTU once AETC got involved? That is fairly recent by my standards.

 

I don’t recall for sure but I could tease it out as I had to brief this stuff annually at the 4 star level every year for about 6 years…

I think the fighter rate Air Force wide was pretty level for my last 10 years in, and very low compared to years before. The graph was clearly asymptotic to a pretty darned low number per 100K hours flown.

My one or two crazy F-16 years were when AETC had the highest time Vipers and all of our burner cans started melting off at the same time and NVGs became a new way to kill pilots.

 

Will- I remember then. That is when they had Viper pilots doing night low toss maneuvers with LGBs. Nothing like being in a 100 deg bank in the dark trying to find a target with an IR pod and then lasing it. Bad enough when we did it with two crew members, with one only flying and the other one acquiring and tracking the target.

 

Yep. The NVGs were the next thing that came along. Once we got everyone trained and used to them, we ditched our left side wart (IR Pod), moved to medium altitude and moved on…

 

When I was operating the flight line during the 50th Anniversary of the B-17 I said a well felt goodbye to an aviation cadet and his instructor as they were leaving to return to Texas in a T-38. I asked the cadet how he liked the airplane and he said, " This SOB will kill you!"

 

Sure can...

but overall it’s a very safe airplane. It’s fast as snot and thinking ahead is about the only added skill needed, which it teaches best. It flies very well and is very predictable in everything it does. It’s a no-surprises airplane. Once you’ve mastered overhead patterns and landings and published instrument approaches in the thing, your all set. Short of the space shuttle and maybe an F-104, there’s not much out there to challenge a Talon pilot. After the Talon, it’s not piloting that is difficult, it’s the missions and the skills to plan and execute that are the ball-busters.

 

Apparently you are correct...

Maybe this statement from the family of a student killed a couple years ago led to that decision...

“Although it is the instructor’s mandate to keep a student pilot safe, it should not be his or her job to ensure preservation of life during an exceedingly unsafe maneuver in an exceedingly tired old plane in which minor student errors occurring in hundredths of a second cannot be corrected quickly enough by the instructor,” the family’s statement said. “We don’t think the Air Force is doing right by our Airmen and Airwomen by mandating student pilots land in formation in a plane so old that it doesn’t perform as responsively as needed to prevent loss of life.”

 

It's a sad state of affairs if you ask me. Not sure what the current UPT washout rate is by in my class back in the mid 80s it was about 45%.

 

Yep. 88-06. We started with 64 and graduated 34. So 47% gone out the door. Just about every week for the last 6 months we’d have somebody bust their 3rd checkride or -89 ride. It was brutal for those guys and gals at the bottom. But they went on to live.

 

Will, Jim- That is what happens with no war. My brother was washed out in the early 70s when USAF was also winding down Vietnam and trying to cut down on excess pilots. Their rate was around 50%.

 

I don’t know the number, but I would bet it’s pretty low. The syllabus has also been whittled down so much over the past 5 years or so. There’s a new program, UPT 2.5 I think it’s called, where I’m told you get your wings after T-6’s. We haven’t seen any graduates if that program yet, and to be fair I don’t know if that’s after an expanded syllabus compared to before. A few years ago there was talk about eliminating the t-6 for guys who already had a commercial ticket. All that just sounds wrong. I think we’re well beyond the point where the Air Force can do more with less when it comes to training.

Edit- I found this article.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41789/the-truth-about-the-air-forces-biggest-changes-to-pilot-training-since-the-dawn-of-the-jet-age
It discusses all the changes to UPT lately.

 

I think it started down hill when the pilots going to heavies quit flying the T-38. I get that they are/were trying to save time on the airframe but in my opinion that was a really poor decision.

 

Agree. Requiring USAF pilots to have that pedigree of being able to fly fast and think fast was what made the pilot corps so resilient. During Vietnam tanker guys transitioned back into fighters when needed. That would be incredibly difficult today.

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

Ticket punching ?

 

Managers instead of leaders. Short term gain, but stovepipes the pilots to their and USAF's detriment.