Word: planes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...another base before the second crash. Rando's father Paul was stunned by this information when it was relayed to him at his Massachusetts home as part of the Air Force's standard family briefing. "How can you tell me there's not something wrong with this goddam plane when the engine's failed more than 50 times?" he remembers asking. "Something's sure wrong with something...
...late 1996, maintenance crews were making nonstop modifications to the plane's engine, fuel system and brakes. "We've got this airplane practically rebuilt, but [the problems] just don't seem to stop," Senior Master Sergeant Michael Rutland complained to Air Force investigators looking into the second crash. "We wonder what else is wrong with it that we don't know about." More than half the instructor pilots, busy trying to teach others to fly, had "generalized anger" about the T-3, an Air Force psychologist reported. And the cadets were uneasy too. "With two accidents in two years...
...this environment that 20-year-old Pace Weber, a senior cadet, called his mother last summer and confessed his apprehension about the plane. "Since Pace was a little boy, he focused on airplanes and astronauts," Terri Weber says. "Getting into the Air Force Academy was something he wanted since junior high." Pace, who had spent 17 hours in the T-3, was flying last June 25 with his instructor, Captain Glen Comeaux, 31, when their T-3 sputtered during a turn at about 500 ft. It quickly entered a spin and exploded in a fireball just after hitting the ground...