(5 of 5)
Even so, after the third crash, the pilots began to wonder just what they were flying. That accident produced the most devastating account of the T-3's mechanical weaknesses. The official investigation disclosed that after the plane was delivered to the Air Force, manufacturer Slingsby Aviation Ltd. recommended that 119 fixes be made to improve safety. That probe and other reports showed that the Air Force had made numerous engine changes, revised its starting procedure and modified the airplane's fuel lines and cowling, but that the motor had continued to shut down for unknown reasons. The brakes suffer from "sponginess, excessive travel and total loss of brake pressure," the experts said. A cockpit safety alarm designed to warn of an approaching stall keeps failing because it was built to operate on 24 volts while the T-3's electrical system produces 27. Even the plane's rather simple but critical cockpit gauges suffer from "extremely low" reliability, investigators wrote. "I don't know what testing went into all those different changes," Captain Pat Derock, a T-3 instructor pilot, told Air Force investigators. "Some of the modifications were probably not completely or thoroughly tested."
The Air Force insists they were. A week after the third fatal crash in 28 months, the planes were ordered back into the air. The Air Force finally grounded the T-3s last July 25 after an engine once again stopped in midair and neither the cadet nor the instructor could restart it. Luckily, the plane was over the academy runway and landed safely. "We want an effective flight-screening program, but a safe one," says General Lloyd Newton, head of the service's Air Education and Training Command in San Antonio, Texas, who ordered the grounding. "We've certainly bumped into some rough spots with this aircraft, but that doesn't mean it's a bad aircraft."
But two Air Force pilots who have flown T-3s as instructors disagree. They are the widows of Comeaux and Smith. Captain Laura Comeaux had been married to Glen 25 days when he was killed, just before the couple were to buy their first house. And Captain Elizabeth Smith gave birth to her first child, Samantha Clay, four months after her husband Clay's death. "I'm afraid they will do the same thing again and not thoroughly test all the changes they're making," says Smith. She and Comeaux refuse to fly the T-3.