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But at 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 out and were back at work the next day. Only then did the Air Force order parachutes for its T-3s. "It was as if the Air Force held a gun to my son's head and pulled the trigger," Dostal says. "This should have been a safe, learning environment instead of something thought up by some hotdogging general."
On Sept. 30, 1996, a second T-3 crashed 30 miles east of the academy, killing Cadet Dennis Rando, 21, and his instructor, Captain Clay Smith, 28. The Air Force concluded that Rando, a senior, and Smith had been practicing a forced landing and crashed when the engine failed during a key part of the maneuver. The first expert to study the wrecked engine said it was operating at impact. But when they looked into it, Air Force investigators disputed that finding, especially when they discovered that the initial expert didn't work for the Air Force, as they had thought, but was employed by Textron Lycoming, the engine maker. They uncovered the fact that T-3 engines had failed 53 times at the academy and at 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."
By 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, I'm not entirely sure it's completely safe," Cadet Daniel Ronneberg told investigators. In the wake of the accident, the Air Force barred cadets from practicing forced landings. But two days after the second crash, the T-3s were ordered back into the air.