Are Air Force Cadets Flying the Wrong Stuff?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 15, 1999

Training the best fighter pilots in the world is like walking a tight rope, balancing the need to push flyers to the limit ... but not so far that they self-destruct. Accusations, however, are flying that the Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., may have embarked on the latter course with their selection of the T-3 Firefly as their primary airplane for training cadets.

Critics say that the high-powered, acrobatic airplane is far too sophisticated for use by beginning pilots, pointing to six fatalities in three crashes since the plane became the academy's primary trainer in 1995. The planes have been grounded since the last of the crashes in July, 1997, but will soon take to the skies again, piloted by Air Force cadets, stirring up controversy. In the meantime, cadets have been learning the basics at private flying schools near the academy.

The T-3 proponents, led by retired Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak, who was Air Force chief of staff when the T-3 was selected to replace the Cessna 172 (which had served as the primary academy trainer for 31 years without a flying fatality), argue that learning on high-performance planes makes for higher performance pilots.

"We're trying to produce warrior pilots, with the emphasis on warrior," McPeak recently told a reporter with the Scripps Howard News Service. "We want people who are adventure- and warrior-oriented, and we couldn't test for that in the old plane. Anybody can fly that -- it's for grandmothers."

The plane served as the cornerstone of an "enhanced flight-screening" program that was meant to separate stronger pilots from weaker earlier in the process. That enhanced screening, McPeak has said, includes "putting people upside down and seeing how they react to it."

"In my experience in the T-3, we never washed anybody out for acrobatics," former Air Force instructor pilot Jeanne Golder says in the article. "We washed people out who had a fear of flying, who got airsick or who just didn't want to be a pilot, and we found that out before we did acrobatics." The Cessna served those purposes well, according to Golder.

Richard Hartlaub, another former instructor pilot who left the Air Force in 1996, says the academy "ought to sell those planes" because the T-3 is just "too much plane" for beginning pilots, and too unforgiving of the mistakes beginners are prone to make.

"Call up as many civilian flight schools as you want and ask if they're putting beginning students into an acrobatic, spinnable aircraft," Hartlaub said. "When you tell this plane to depart from controlled flight, it snaps off at a very quick rate. You're on your back before you know it."

Hartlaub and others also say the Air Force cut comers in testing the academy's 110-plane, $32 million fleet of T-3s, and ignored the plane's reliability problems, including 66 reported cases of engine failure, until after a third crash.