By Calvin Palmer
Mechanical failures and errors of judgment led to a Marine Corps jet crashing in a San Diego neighborhood last December and killing four members of one family, the Marines said yesterday.
Four officers – the squadron commander, squadron operations officer, standardization officer and maintenance officer – have been relieved of their duties, a move that basically ends their military careers. Eight other Marines and one sailor have been reprimanded, said Maj. Gen. Randolph Alles, assistant wing commander for the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station.
The pilot of the F/A-18D Hornet Lt. Dan Neubauer has been grounded while his flight status is reviewed, Alles said.
That decision usually spells the end of a pilot’s flying career.
At least 10 minutes before Neubauer’s F/A-18D Hornet went down in the Universal City neighborhood, he was asking Marine superiors about what to do after one engine lost power and the other was possibly failing, according to air traffic control recordings released by the Federal Aviation Authority yesterday.
Neubauer turned down two chances to land his jet at North Island Naval Air Station, a nearby coastal airfield, while he was still offshore. He instead flew further over residential neighborhoods to attempt an emergency landing at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station.
Had Neubauer and the other Marines followed standard protocol, they would have realized the severity of the situation and diverted the aircraft to North Island, said Col. John Rupp, operations officer for the 3rd Marine Air Wing at Mirimar.
Rupp said there was “collectively bad decision-making” by officers in San Diego who told the pilot to land at the inland base. He faulted the pilot for neglecting to consult a checklist of emergency procedures and for failing to grasp the severity of his problems.
The first engine indicated low oil pressure 10 minutes into the 47-minute training flight, which began from the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the San Diego coast, Rupp said. The pilot shut off the engine seven minutes later.
A squadron representative on the aircraft carrier told the pilot to land at North Island, which was a “conservative and prudent decision,” Rupp said. “Unfortunately, that decision was never made.”
A low-fuel warning occurred 25 minutes into the flight, when the plane was 61 miles off the coast from North Island, he said.
Officers at Miramar, including the squadron’s commanding officer, cleared the pilot to go to the inland base, favoring Miramar’s longer runway and assuming the pilot was closer to the base than he actually was, Rupp said.
The plane had about 340 gallons of fuel when the pilot safely ejected, crashing two miles from the runway in a residential neighborhood, the Marines said. Two homes were destroyed and three others were damaged.
Four members of a family were killed — Young Mi Yoon, 36; her daughters Grace, 15 months, and Rachel, 2 months; and her mother, Suk Im Kim, 60. Kim was visiting from South Korea.
Even though mechanics had identified a fuel-transfer glitch in Neubauer’s jet in July, the Marine Corps flew 146 more sorties with it before the December 8 crash.
The Corps now requires aircraft to be grounded when they have a fuel-transfer problem, which occurs when fuel does not flow to the engines.
The dozens of successful flights after the warning “lured the maintenance personnel into a state of complacency,” Rupp said. “More effective maintenance practices and stronger supervision in the maintenance department could have directed further troubleshooting prior to this flight.”
Col. Kurt Brubaker, staff judge advocate of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, said no one person shouldered the brunt of the blame.
“Collectively, there were a number of judgment errors,” he said.
[Based on reports by the San Diego Union-Tribune, newsday.com and Associated Press.]
1 Comment
March 9, 2009 at 2:25 pm
This pilot is guilty of murder and should be prosecuted. Worth reading on the subject: http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w64.html and http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/025684.html