Word: air
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...argued, taught students to fly only straight and level, and didn't teach cadets the building blocks of military flying, including a dizzying array of loops, rolls and spins. With the T-3, the Air Force could offer what it called an "enhanced flight-screening program," which could pinpoint "those cadets who have the basic aptitude to become Air Force pilots." McPeak encouraged his service to buy a trainer that could spin, the wing tips tracing a circle after the plane has lost, at least temporarily, its ability to remain aloft. It is a maneuver so dangerous that Air Force...
...least one lesson was still to be learned. When an Air Force officer briefed Shirley Dostal on the crash, she asked why her son hadn't had a parachute. The officer explained that parachutes would be of little use in the T-3 because the plane lacked ejection seats. Five months after Mark died, another T-3 went into a spin, and the crew couldn't recover. It was a lot like Dostal's crash, except for one thing. It was a British T-3 flying over the English Midlands, and both pilots were wearing parachutes. They bailed...
...Air Force brass, eager to please the boss, bought the 1,750-lb. English-manufactured Slingsby T-3 and made it mandatory for all cadets to fly the craft if they want to earn their wings. It is a tiny plane, half the length and one-tenth the weight of the F-16, the Air Force's smallest fighter. But its standard, 160-hp engine was not powerful enough to do spins and loops in the thin Rocky Mountain air over the mile-high academy. So a 7.7-liter, 260-hp engine was crammed into the 25-ft.-long plastic...
...January 1995. At a meeting a week before the first crash, several grumbled that the T-3 lacked parachutes. "It's crazy that we don't fly with parachutes," said one of the instructors present, Captain Dan Fischer. "It's an FAA regulation if you do acrobatics." Air Force superiors said the service didn't have to obey Federal Aviation Administration rules even though the T-3, unlike most Air Force planes, is registered with the FAA. Back at his apartment, Fischer was blunter. "Someone's going to die before they get rid of these spins," he told his roommate...
...Air Force investigation concluded that Dostal put the plane into a spin and that Fischer fumbled the recovery because the Air Force had not adequately trained him. The crash report said the engine was running while the plane plunged a mile in 30 sec., in 17 ever tightening spirals, into a snow-covered pasture. Yet witnesses told investigators the plane was silent as it came down. The Air Force grounded the T-3s for a week. And when they resumed flying, spins were banned...