WASHINGTON (AP) — A fiery January drop of a B-1 bomber in South Dakota was caused by multiple crew failures, terrible winter weather, and a last-minute wind shear hit that resulted in the ejection of all four crew members and the total loss of the U.S. warplane. $450 million, Air Force Global Strike Command said Thursday.
The command report was unusually blunt in describing what the investigation found about the crews involved in the overnight crash at Ellsworth Air Force Base. Investigators said the crash exposed an “organizational culture that tolerated deteriorating piloting skills, a lack of discipline, poor communication and inadequate focus on regulations.”
The report is used to inform Air Force decisions about disciplinary action, so it is not yet clear whether any crew members or their leaders will be disciplined as a result of the accident.
The B-1 is one of three long-range American bombers. The supersonic aircraft carries conventional weapons and is capable of taking off from the US to strike overseas targets in a single mission. The old warplane is being maintained by the Air Force until the new B-21 Raider stealth bomber comes online.
On the night of the accident, the B-1 was the second of two bombers on a training flight that was about to land in a rapidly deteriorating winter. Although both bombers came in too low for the weather they faced, the first was able to correct its speed and altitude to land in visibility so low that the control tower could see neither the bomber nor the taxi lights after landing. .
The second bomber also came in very low, but inside the cockpit the crew were not doing what was necessary – relaying specific communications to each other and taking responsibility for monitoring and checking the aircraft’s instrument readings to ensure they maintained the required speed. altitude and descent.
In the final 55 seconds of flight, the bomber encountered wind shear and the pilot’s reactions resulted in the aircraft losing excessive power. But neither the pilot nor a supervising instructor pilot noticed this in time because they were looking outside the aircraft instead of monitoring its instruments, and the necessary communications that could have detected the error did not occur.
Another crew member responsible for assisting with the cross-check testified that he was reading a post-landing checklist instead of supporting the instruments, investigators found. The flight became unrecoverable. When the B-1 hit the ground near the runway, all four crew members ejected successfully.
Almost every part of the flight had problems, even the ejection, the investigation found.
While the scathing report suggested there may be larger issues to resolve at Ellsworth, it also raised questions about whether ongoing pressure on personnel, resources and aircraft availability – an issue facing military aviation in general – played a role.
Most notably, communication and supervision eroded not only within the crashed bomber, but also within its squadron and even in the control tower. A squadron pre-flight briefing did not include an important warning that required crews to approach at a higher altitude given the loss of visibility, and investigators found that none of the eight airmen aboard the two bombers knew the Force’s instructions. Aerial for cold weather. they were flying. There was an “intentional disregard” for the equipment each crew member was required to wear, the lack of which possibly contributed to the injuries they suffered upon ejection.
After the accident, two members of the maintenance team failed toxicological tests. And although each crew member survived, the instructor pilot was injured during the ejection, likely because he weighed at least the maximum 245 pounds that the ejection seat could support. A few days after the accident, he weighed 260 pounds, among many other discrepancies, the report found.
At the airfield, communications were also disrupted. A key sensor on its runway, which could have told crews how poor visibility was, had been malfunctioning for months, and although air traffic control knew it was broken, the squadron did not. At the time of the accident, the control tower knew that visibility on the ground was zero, but did not communicate this to anyone, not even the first bomber. Even when the first of two bombers flying that night landed, it did not transmit information to the second aircraft that visibility conditions were “at the lowest of minutes,” the report concluded.
But ultimately, the second bomber crashed because the crew “succumbed to complacency and fixation, while the (instructor pilot) was ineffective in his crew leadership and instructor supervision roles,” investigators found.
There are about 45 B-1 bombers still flying, split between Ellsworth and Dyess Air Force Base in Texas. After the crash, Ellsworth’s remaining bombers and their crews were temporarily relocated to Dyess for operation and training.
Charles Hoffman, a spokesman for Global Strike Command, said it was remarkable that just a month after the crash and redeployment, Ellsworth’s B-1s were able to regroup and were responsible for successful retaliatory strikes against 85 targets. of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria in response to an attack on U.S. forces that killed three service members.
“They traveled more than 30 hours nonstop, round trip, delivered the strike package and returned to Dyess,” Hoffman said.
Prior to the accident, flight hours and personnel at Ellsworth were reduced to maximize resources to operate B-1 squadrons at Dyess, which may also have contributed to the accident.
Some crew members were unable to fly anywhere near the number of hours per month required to remain proficient. The report revealed that the instructor pilot had flown just 5.6 hours in the B-1 in the 60 days before the accident.
Many mid-level leadership positions responsible for oversight and ensuring the dissemination of critical flight information were left unstaffed, “cutting the connective tissue” across the squadron and overwhelming the officers who were left to complete the remaining tasks. As a result, many tasks were assigned to more junior airmen.
At the time of the accident, the 34th Bomb Squadron director of operations “testified that he chose to focus on administrative office work” despite worsening weather and knowing he had a non-instructor junior pilot serving as flight supervisor.
The failures “all relate to issues of culture and leadership”, concluded the investigation.
