Posted on 03/07/2012 8:42:57 PM PST by U-238
Three months after the Air Force placed blame squarely on an F-22 fighter pilot who died when he crashed in the service's most expensive plane after his oxygen system failed in mid-air, a top Air Force official is apparently backtracking -- saying that the pilot was not blamed and that he did the best he could in the situation he was in.
"We did not assign blame to the pilot," U.S. Air Force chief of staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said before a House subcommittee Tuesday when asked about the crash and the troubled F-22 program by Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., according to multiple reports. "… This was a complex contingency that he did his best to manage and, in the end, we lost aircraft control."
Schwartz's comments seem to contradict the conclusions an Air Force board reached after an intense, months-long investigation into the November 2010 crash that claimed the life of Capt. Jeff Haney, who the Air Force called an exceptional aviator. Haney crashed in the Alaskan wilderness after a malfunction caused his oxygen system to shut down completely, meaning he suffered "a sense similar to suffocation" in mid-flight, according to the Air Force report.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Yeah, "a sense similar to suffocation" in that he couldn't, like, breathe.
Other than that, it was pilot error.
F-22 Fighter
$354.9 million — per unit cost
$66,714.1 million — total program cost
187 operational
strangles pilots
>sigh<
It does look amazing though. Hope they can figure this out soon...
God bless this pilot.
The more complex the mechanism, the more opportunities for failure. You can scream at the world all you want but chaos theory will win in the long run.
It isn’t good news — but it is news.
I guess they have about 186 more chances...
There are stories of F-16 crashes that were called 'Pilot Error' by the USAF. I remember a wife refused to believe the USAF explanation. She never lost faith in her husband as a good pilot.
Family members got together, hired investigators, and files a LAW SUIT, which they WON.
High-Flying Troubles - United States Air Force safety record (F-16)
If there is a problem with these planes, they should be temporarily grounded until the problem (if any) is fixed.
They have been - twice. Any problem is so intermittent and fleeting that they can't find it. But they are still trying.
You try to fly a 5th generation jet while suffocating, you are going to make errors
I suggest that the USAF continues looking.I know to train a Naval aviator is somewhere around a million dollars and more to get them qualified.So it should be around the same amount for a USAF pilot.Its a very expensive investment.
Ironic. When they crashed the prototype while filming a commercial, they went out of their way NOT to blame the pilot, when it really was his fault.
But then again, he lived through the event.
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