Originally Posted by
Dan Winterland
For the same reason a lot of military equipment is procured. It was the lowest bid! ..
...or perhaps it had a high-ranking officer as its champion ?
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The T-3's {FireFly} crash record is all the more startling because from 1964 to 1994, cadets flew the trainer's predecessor, the T-41, without a single fatality. But in 1995, the Air Force Academy said goodbye to the plodding T-41 {Cessna 172} and its sturdy safety record, replacing it with the muscular T-3.
That decision is starting to look like a mistake. A TIME investigation, based on dozens of interviews as well as a review of Air Force documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, suggests that the T-3 is a plane too perilous for veteran pilots, much less beginners, to fly.
The T-3's introduction to Air Force training was a particular passion of General Merrill McPeak, the service's chief of staff in the early 1990s. McPeak, a fighter pilot who had flown with the Thunderbirds, the Air Force's precision-flying team, is now retired..
"The T-41 is your grandmother's airplane," says McPeak of the T-3's predecessor.
"Our mission is to train warrior-pilots, not dentists to fly their families to Acapulco."
The old T-41, he 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."
Defenders of the plane argue that's exactly what T-3 training is meant to accomplish. "We don't want to kill people at the Air Force Academy, obviously," McPeak says. "But we drove [Commerce Secretary] Ron Brown and a planeload of VIPs into the hills of Yugoslavia because of pilot error." "We don't want to kill a planeload of people because we haven't properly identified the people who can do this job."
McPeak, a former F-15 pilot, suggests the fact that all three dead T-3 instructor pilots flew bulky cargo planes before coming to the academy might have contributed to the accidents.
"Maybe if you'd had three fighter pilots in there instead of three C-141 pilots, you wouldn't have had the same result." ...
(Time Magazine: January 12, 1998)
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