WAY, WAY OFF IN THE WILD BLUE YONDER

By Mark Thompson/Washington

At about 2 p.m. on June 24, 1994, a B-52 bomber took off from Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State to practice air-show maneuvers. Barely 15 minutes later, while attempting to circle the runway's control tower in a steep turn, it crashed at 170 m.p.h., narrowly missing nuclear weapons bunkers and a crowded airmen's school. No one had wanted to fly with the pilot-Lieut. Colonel Arthur Holland, a 24-year veteran about to retire. Indeed, two of the three other officers killed with Holland were there because their subordinates feared flying with him.

Holland had a reputation as a "hot stick." He once climbed so steeply that fuel flowed out of the vent holes on top of the B-52's wing tanks. His hard flying in one air show popped 500 rivets during a prohibited climb, and he put his B-52 into a "death spiral" over one of his daughter's high school softball games. One copilot complained he had to wrestle control from Holland, who cleared a ridgeline by three feet during a run three months before his final flight. Most ominously, junior crewmembers said Holland had often talked about "rolling" a B-52 in flight -- something that has never been done. Yet Holland's superiors put him in charge of evaluating all B-52 pilots at the base. And while 13 commanders allowed him to keep flying, only one -- on assignment for barely a year and never warned by his predecessors of Holland's reputation -- was court-martialed over the crash. (He pleaded guilty last week.)

The Holland case is only one in a catalog of little-known but horrific disasters detailed in a confidential report by Alan Diehl, the Air Force's former top civilian safety official. The litany -- obtained by TIME last week -- includes 30 cases of mangled military probes and cover-ups by "incompetents, charlatans and sycophants." Diehl charges that Air Force crash probes are routinely sabotaged by officers seeking to please superiors, hide culpability and avoid embarrassment. Accidents like Holland's, says Diehl, "suggest the all too familiar pattern of ignoring dangerous behavior of certain individuals, especially when they are well liked, regarded as good flyers or hold high rank." His report to Defense Secretary William Perry, Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall and the congressional armed services panels makes clear that the problem is widespread. "These cases," he told them, "are just the tip of the iceberg."

The Diehl report says that "the U.S.A.F. major-mishap rate has increased by over 30% while the Navy and Army rates have decreased by 40% and 50%" over the past three years, not counting the five accidents that have killed 16 since April 17, including one last Friday. And there are potential civilian consequences. Last fall, Diehl reports, a pair of B-52s "narrowly missed colliding" with an airliner, an incident apparently "hushed up." Diehl writes, "This business, which has always been dangerous, has become unnecessarily deadly."

Danny Piper, a retired Air Force colonel, once believed the Air Force could fairly investigate its own wreckage. He's changed his mind, he says, "the hard way." On April 14, 1994, his daughter, Lieut. Laura Piper, 25, was one of 26 people killed when Air Force F-15s shot down two Army helicopters over Iraq. Four senior officers, including two generals, have declined to testify at hearings, citing the right against self-incrimination. The court-martial of AWACS Captain Jim Wang, the only officer facing trial in the shootdown, is scheduled for next week. The tragedy, says Diehl, is a "reflection of much larger, systemic problems with the U.S.A.F. safety program." Piper and his wife Joan were upset to learn last week that one of the F-15 pilots is again flying Air Force jets and that the service has barred Diehl from testifying at Wang's court-martial.

Diehl has many tales. Last year a C-130 cargo plane collided with an F-16 fighter jet over Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, killing 24 people. The so-called composite-wing policy that grouped perhaps incompatible planes at the same base was not evaluated by investigators. It was the idea of General Merrill McPeak, the service's top officer before he retired last fall. "Other investigators felt this issue was at the crux of the accident, but dared not bring it up again," Diehl writes. Instead an air-traffic controller was blamed. The pilots involved have resumed flying. "It is unfortunate," Diehl says, "when an investigation focuses on the errors made by an inadequately trained enlisted man, while ignoring other problems which were created by senior leaders."

During the Gulf War buildup, an F-15 fighter feigned an attack on an F-111 warplane "without warning them," Diehl says. "The inexperienced mishap pilot, apparently thinking they were under actual attack, crashed while taking evasive action." The crash was listed as a "combat loss."

In 1981 a KC-135 missile-tracking plane crashed after crewmen's wives climbed into both pilots' seats. They were encouraged by the Air Force to accompany their husbands on "spousal-orientation flights." "The wives were being allowed to sit in both pilots' seats, and one apparently maneuvered the controls, sending the aircraft out of control," Diehl says. From an altitude of 29,000 feet, the plane spiraled at 400 miles an hour for about 90 seconds before it hit a barley field. The last voice heard via radio was a woman's. "The [investigation] board decided they would report that one pilot seat was occupied by a spouse, but they would conceal the fact that the second pilot was also not at the controls during this mishap."

The Air Force isn't the only service with embarrassing accidents, Diehl notes. During a 1989 flight by two Navy F-14s, the two crewmen aboard a Tomcat "removed their flight suits, helmets and oxygen masks in an apparent attempt to 'moon' the crew of the other aircraft. Unfortunately, this 'college-boy' prank proved fatal when they passed out" and plummeted into the Arizona desert.

Others back up Diehl's contentions. Says John Nance, one of the nation's leading aviation-safety experts: "There's a major, cancerous problem in the Air Force that has to be changed." In the wake of the Gulf War, the Air Force general in charge of safety warned that "we are headed for disaster" because of the corroding integrity of Air Force crash investigations. "The investigative process," Brigadier General Joel Hall declared in a retirement letter to the Air Force's top officer, "has been politicized to the point of dysfunction." Some Air Force officials say Diehl was eased out as senior civilian at the Air Force Safety Agency in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and into a nearby Air Force testing job last October because of his views.

Though the Pentagon inspector general is investigating Diehl's charges, the Air Force said Friday the current system "has served the Air Force well for many years." Nonetheless, there is a growing call for an independent Pentagon agency to investigate accidents. Safety expert Nance advocates a full-time professional staff dedicated to that mission. Pilots would play a key advisory role, as they do in probes of civilian airliner accidents. "The demonstrated reality is that we can't be trusted to investigate ourselves," says Nance. "Every accident in which people are hurt or killed is a lesson for which we pay in blood. The current system prevents these lessons being taught to future flyers."