PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - T-38 Talon crash during formation landing
Old 9th May 2020, 18:59
  #41 (permalink)  
Lonewolf_50
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Texas
Age: 64
Posts: 7,201
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For Two's in:
Just on a hunch (and based on a few years answering Congressional Inquiries) given the lawyering up of Wilke's family, I suspect that they'd be the same kind of people who'd have pushed their District Representative in the House for an investigation had Wilke been disenrolled from training after a fail on a chop check.

I have seen this movie before.

A similar accident happened over 30 years ago at Whiting Field, though not due to formation landing.
A student who was on the cusp of being disenrolled was taken up with one of the best IPs in the Wing. Standards IP, NATOPS Instructor, etc. The result of the sortie was two fatalities and a destroyed aircraft. It was years later that I found out (from the dead student's roommate who ended up in my squadron) that one of his documented tendencies during training was to lock up / freeze up on the controls.
Whether or not that was a factor in the accident will never be known.
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