Lack of manual flying skills?

Disaster in the Sky: Old Planes, Inexperienced Pilots-and No More Parachutes


A view shows wreckage of Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker plane near site of crash near Kyrgyz village of Chaldovar - Part of the tail of the doomed KC-135.

Both pilots graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2008, shortly after the service decided it couldn't afford to keep parachutes on KC-135s. "A lot of time, manpower and money goes into buying, maintaining and training to use parachutes," the Air Force said in March 2008. "With the Air Force hungry for cost-saving efficiency under its Air Force for Smart Operations in the 21st Century Program, commonly known as AFSO 21, the parachutes were deemed obsolete."

Captain Mark Tyler Voss, 27, Captain Victoria Pinckney, 27, and Technical Sergeant Herman "Tre" Mackey III, 30, were the first airmen killed in a KC-135 crash since the Air Force stripped the parachutes from the planes.

Given the violent end of their mission, the parachutes may not have made any difference, according to the official Air Force investigation into the crash. "The [accident investigation] board sort of concluded, informally, in talking among themselves, that even if there had been parachutes, there would have been no way for them in this particular case for them to be used," Air Force Lieut. Colonel John Thomas, a spokesman for the service's Air Mobility Command, said Monday.

Others aren't so sure. "Deploying aircrews to a combat zone without parachutes is an unconscionable risk," says Alan Diehl, who spent 18 years as an Air Force civilian investigating the safety of the service's aircraft. "The airmen aboard this KC-135 would have had to don their chutes, jettison the cockpit bailout hatch, and dive overboard-all in a matter of seconds. But to take away the option just seems wrong."

The aerial tanker arrived in Kyrgyzstan the day before the accident. Earlier flight-control problems had reportedly been fixed. Pilot Tyler, co-pilot Pinckney and, Mackey, the refueling boom operator, boarded the aircraft early that afternoon at the Pentagon's transit hub at Manas, just outside Bishkek, the country's capital.


A KC-135 refuels an F-15 fighter.

They were the first crew to fly the 707-based aircraft toward Afghanistan, loaded with 175,000 pounds of aviation fuel, since its arrival at Manas. Tanker crews are the unsung heroes of the service, the so-called "global reach" that vastly extends how far Air Force aircraft can fly without landing to refuel.

Voss had slightly more than 1,000 hours flying such tankers; Pickney had fewer than 600. Mackey was the most experienced member of the crew, with 3,350 KC-135 flight hours, but as the boom operator he had nothing to do with flying the airplane.

Shortly after the flight, dubbed Shell 77, took off, a problem with the flight-control system triggered "rudder hunting," which caused the airplane to yaw, its nose turning from left to right and back again.


Nine minutes into the flight, the plane entered a "dutch roll," which can happen as increasing yaw generates more lift on one wing than the other. That causes the plane to roll, until increased drag pulls the wing back and the process repeats itself with the other wing. "It's kind of waffling," the crew reported as they climbed above 20,000 feet. "The jet's bent."

The pilots tried to bring the five-second-long dutch rolls under control by using the plane's rudder and auto-pilot. But that only made matters worse.

"The cumulative effects of the malfunctioning [flight-control system], coupled with autopilot use and rudder movements during the unrecognized dutch roll, generated dutch roll forces that exceeded the mishap aircraft's design structural limits," the Air Force said in its investigation into the crash, released last month. "The tail section failed and separated from the aircraft, causing the mishap aircraft to pitch down sharply, enter into a high-speed dive, explode inflight and subsequently impact the ground."

Voss's superiors described him as a "peerless aviator" who was "highly motivated and extremely dedicated." Pickney's commanders said she was "a superior leader with the drive and ability to succeed at any task."

But despite their demonstrated skills, the investigation said that instead of trying to halt the dutch roll with the rudder and auto-pilot, they should have shut down the malfunctioning flight-control system and manually used the ailerons on the main wings to regain control.

So why didn't they?

"The mishap crew appears to not have been adequately trained for the dutch roll recognition and recovery; they experienced a condition they had not encountered in training," the investigation concluded. "The mishap crew received a total of 10-15 minutes of recognition and recovery training several years prior to the mishap," during initial pilot training.