High-Flying Troubles

Insight on the News, Jan 3, 2000 by Frank J. Murray

Insiders say an F-16 will be destroyed in a noncombat crash every 20,000 flight hours, a dismal safety record that the Air Force and the manufacturers have failed to improve.

The Air Force has spent more than $50 billion buying frontline F-16 jet fighters since 1975. But 6 million flying hours later, the service and the manufacturers still have not fixed the myriad and deadly problems that plague the plane.

In the year that ended Sept. 30, for example, 15 F-16s crashed in noncombat operations. Ten of those crashes were blamed on engine failure, making it the worst year yet for engine problems on F-16s. The cost of each crash is calculated at $20 million, and two pilots died.

"I won't forget those phone calls," says Brig. Gen. Mark Welsh, commandant of cadets at the Air Force Academy, about the difficulty of informing family members when one of his squadron's F-16 pilots died at the bottom of "a smoking hole" in the desert. "And I won't forget sitting here looking at this airplane with the helmet with his name on the visor cover, his name on the canopy and his spare G-suit hanging under the wing with his crew chief saluting the jet, while bagpipes -- the bagpipe tape of `Amazing Grace' -- played in the background and every fighter pilot on base had these big stupid sunglasses on so nobody would know that they were bawling their eyes out."

Insiders now consider it certain that an F-16 will be destroyed in a noncombat crash every 20,000 flight hours, a dismal safety record. This sense of inevitability was underscored by Col. Michael Haugen, commander of the 119th Fighter Wing at Fargo, N.D., when his F-16 unit was honored for the "phenomenal achievement" of flying more than 40,000 hours without a "Class A mishap" one in which someone dies or damage exceeds $1 million.

Air Force figures indicate that, historically, half of all military crashes are "pilot-induced." But investigative reports obtained by the Washington Times, a sister publication of Insight, show that most recent F-16 crashes were traced to mechanical flaws that went unnoticed during inspections, including parts that failed prematurely or were not installed. The Times also found that institutional accountability is rare, thanks to a system of secrecy, immunity from lawsuits for the government and manufacturers, the absence of outside investigators and limits on Freedom of Information Act disclosure.

Air Force officials caution that there is inherent danger in flying a relatively tiny plane with a 32-foot wing span whose fuselage is all engine. When loaded with missiles, fuel and 20 mm ammunition for its 100-shot-per-second Gatling guns, it weighs nearly as much as a small tank. They also point to crashes during military maneuvers that take the plane to twice the speed of sound -- maneuvers that can disorient a pilot or cause loss of consciousness from extreme gravitational forces. Those crashes almost always rank as pilot error. But officials have not said in public reports whether some pilots are ejecting from planes that might have been saved.

Pilots often say they fear they will be blamed for accidents caused by one of the chronic mechanical glitches. They know that the Air Force, like other services, rarely looks back at "pilot-error" decisions to determine whether a new-found mechanical flaw was involved.

"Jan, if I crash my F-16, don't cry for me because I died doing what I wanted to do. But get yourself a copy of the safety report and the best attorney in town because it ain't going to be my fault," Capt. Ted Harduvel told his wife who, as a widow, testified to that epitaph back in 1982.

Some F-16 accidents involved bad II luck, such as a jet hitting a flock of pelicans over Nebraska or two wild pigs grazing on a Florida airport. In one case, a pilot took an F-16, advertised to operate at 50,000 feet, to astonishing stratospheric levels above 75,000 feet. Once there, the engine quit for lack of oxygen and the plane stalled in the rarefied air.

But investigation reports show the most common current problems are:

* Failure of turbine blades from metallurgical stress undetected by periodic inspections. The jet engine destroys itself when either blades in the turbines or stator vanes fail in flight.

* Failure of compressor-discharge pressure seals, which causes the powerful engine to seize up and quit. In at least two cases, pilots couldn't correct oil-starvation while flying upside down because the switch for the manual pitch override on the left side of the control panel is too far away to reach without "body twist or lean."

* Computer errors that cause the digital engine-control system to misinterpret high revolutions from a worn generator shaft as a racing engine, leading the computer to reduce power. When power is lost during a takeoff roll, even the most experienced pilot ejects and trusts his life to a parachute, leaving the empty $20-million aircraft to crash.

* Catastrophic afterburner failure due to cracks in the 70 spot welds on older augmenter ducts. When most F16s were grounded last winter, inspectors checking 712 engines for cracked welds in afterburner-augmenter ducts found 63 had cracks that could have caused breakups. At that point, 11 already had failed in flight.