The F-15 thundered down the runway, all grace and raw power, until it cartwheeled into the woods in a huge explosion. The lone U.S. Air Force pilot perished instantly in the crash at Germany's Spangdahlem air base last year. Another victim, far from the fireball that day, was also consumed--in a different way. He suffered much longer.
This is a story about how the Air Force pushed the principle of accountability to a tragic extreme. To make up for an earlier, fatal misdeed left initially unpunished, the Air Force court-martialed a pair of mechanics who had made what appeared to be a good repair on a piece of equipment that the Air Force admitted was poorly designed. Instead of acknowledging that it had been warned about the problem, the Air Force pursued the senior mechanic with such zeal that he came to believe suicide was his only escape.
Technical Sergeant Thomas Mueller spent 15 min. under the F-15's sleek skin on May 17, 1995, finishing a repair job left undone by others. Mueller, Technical Sergeant William Campbell and a third man rebolted a pair of flight-control rods to two hookups that relayed the pilot's tug on his control stick to the movable flaps that control the plane's flight. Mueller, a highly regarded 17-year Air Force mechanic, double-checked the work with a mirror and flashlight.
They didn't know how easy it was to crisscross the thin metal rods. But the Air Force knew: in 1986 and 1991 mechanics at other bases had made the same error. Their F-15 pilots were saved from certain death only because an alert ground crew and one pilot noted the flaps weren't moving properly before takeoff. But as Major Donald Lowry Jr., 36, prepared to fly on May 30, 1995, no one noticed the snafu. So Lowry's plane, instead of being lifted into the sky that Memorial Day morning, was pushed into the runway and disintegrated at 250 m.p.h.
It was Mueller's misfortune to be part of the 52nd Fighter Wing, the outfit that mistakenly downed two U.S. Army helicopters over Iraq in 1994, killing 26 people. The 52nd's commanders had failed to bring the two F-15 pilots to court-martial for their central role in the disaster. That didn't please General Ronald Fogleman, the tough-talking fighter pilot who runs the Air Force. In August 1995 he effectively ended the pilots' careers with letters of condemnation. "We are held in high regard by the public because of the integrity we demonstrate by holding ourselves accountable and others accountable for their actions," Fogleman told the Air Force. He declared that he scolded the 52nd's leadership for its neglect.
If the Air Force really wanted someone to blame for Lowry's crash, it could have gone back and figured out why no one had done anything following the earlier, identical mistakes. "Cross-connecting the rods is an easy mistake to make," an Air Force report warned after the 1986 foul-up. "We ought to fix it so they can't be connected wrong," a second said. The Air Force ignored that recommendation and even failed to warn its mechanics of the danger.