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It was in this environment that 20-year-old Pace Weber, a senior cadet, called his mother last summer and confessed his apprehension about the plane. "Since Pace was a little boy, he focused on airplanes and astronauts," Terri Weber says. "Getting into the Air Force Academy was something he wanted since junior high." Pace, who had spent 17 hours in the T-3, was flying last June 25 with his instructor, Captain Glen Comeaux, 31, when their T-3 sputtered during a turn at about 500 ft. It quickly entered a spin and exploded in a fireball just after hitting the ground two miles east of the academy airfield. Their plane had been written up by pilots 10 times for engine problems, including one during the flight immediately before the fatal trip. The Air Force said the engine was running at impact, although it was producing so little power that the propeller was barely turning. "If Pace was flying in the Gulf War and died, I could understand that," his mother says. "But they were just supposed to be seeing if he could be a good pilot."
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." Other Air Force officers point out that the plane has flown without an accident at an Air Force base at Hondo, Texas, where the instructors, who are civilians working under contract with the Air Force, have spent years flying small, piston-powered aircraft like the T-3. "If the engine quits, we know how to land the airplane and walk away from it," a civilian pilot at Hondo says. "The Air Force guys just know how to bail out when that happens." 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."
Many T-3 pilots at both Hondo and Colorado Springs believe the plane flies much better in the lower, and heavier, Texas air than in the thin air above Colorado's mile-high plains. Some Air Force safety experts have recommended that the entire T-3 operation be based at Hondo. "The flight school shouldn't be in the mountains," says one such expert. "But Annapolis has boats and West Point has cannon, and so saying you're not going to have planes at the Air Force Academy doesn't sound right."