Pilots Charged

[flywithastick]

What's you mil pilots take on this story? Seems like these guys are being roasted in a very big way at the expense of preserving relations with the Canadians (or another case of US officials sacrificing their own for the sake of some other countries feelings). It was a bad deal that those guys got killed, but it seems to me that these things can happen.

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=1984585

 

[Snoopy58]

The devil is very, very much in the details on this one. And those details are WAY beyond most of the public affairs statements, and even farther beyond all the lawyers' statements. Dropping bombs is an awesome responsibility that requires tremendous care to do it exactly right... proper target, proper approvals, rules of engagement, etc. Most of the time, guys take that responsibility every bit as seriously as they need to, and things work the way they're supposed to.

Sometimes, though, mistakes happen. Mostly, even those mistakes are the result of a chain of error chains that defy easy finger-pointing. On rare occasions, though, somebody does something reckless that results in friendlies getting killed.

The line between a guy doing the very best that he can & making an honest mistake, and a guy who gets too aggressive & gets reckless, can be a rather fine one at times (particularly when you get lawyers involved). Without understanding all the situation at hand, the rules & procedures that should have been followed, the full sequence of events, and a whole bunch of details that don't generally get out to the press, it's all but impossible to say which side of the line a particular incident was.

For all that I've read about the F-16 incident with the Canadians, while I've got some opinions, they're not really backed with nearly enough hard data to go out and proclaim as "Well *I* think that these guys..." The people who have the full picture, hopefully, are the AF investigators. Not that they never make mistakes, but they've got a lot more to work with than anybody on the outside.

This case is a long way from fully playing out.

 

[T1bubba]

Snoopy is right on, but he left out the biggest factor of how this will play out... the politics of it. Anyone remember the name Capt Wang? I was at TIK while his court-martial was going on, it was lead story on the 6 o'clock news every night. In that shoot-down there was more than enough blame to go around, but somehow it all got pinned on one AWACs guy. At my squadron his name even got turned into a new word:

Wang- (verb) to be hung out to dry by those in charge, screwed over, f*cked : use "Scheds really wanged me with this 3 am flight this weekend"

I'm not saying he was completely blameless by any means, but there were many folks who could have prevented that incident but didn't. Yet only one faced courts-martial. He ended up being acquited but had already been crucified in the media for several months. The whole thing left me somewhat disenchanted with the military justice system.

I hope these F-16 guys get a fair trial if it comes to that, but I'm still not convinced it should.

 

[Toro]

What's pathetic about this is that the real cause of the accident (whether it is the fault of the pilots, the controllers, or the planners who failed to inform the ground troops of the F-16s and vice cersa) is being overshadowed with a BS claim of pilots being forced to take the "Go-Pills". At least Reuters and CNN have mellowed out the hype that 20/20 came screaming out with.


Go Pill thread

 

[Kaman]

Hi Guys,
That "Go-Pill" incensed me to no end...I went TAD from Japan to NAS Fallon and had major "jet-lag" and the doc gave me one of those "blue pills" (No, not a NATOPS...they stopped making them with blue covers a few years back, too expensive I suppose) to help me get some sleep. Now, if we had "gooned" a low-light NVG/TERF flight out in the Dixie Valley, and CNN got a hold of that, it would be the same thing. A bunch of BS . I know this was a poor analogy, but I wasn't "forced" to swallow that pill and neither were those F-16 drivers.
It seems like the peacetime careerists are still running the Pentagon and heaven help them if they would ever take responsibility for or at least share in the blame for an operatoinal F##K-up...

Regards,

ex-Navy rotorhead

 

[Skyrunner]

Grasping

It's the good ole TWINKIE defense.

Everytime I eat a twinkie I get all excited and turn into JoJo the idiot circus boy. That's when I blow it.

SR