The Dayton Daily News began its 18-month examination of military aviation safety with a fishing expedition. I was fishing for computer databases that hadn't been worked over by 100 reporters when I learned that no one had ever asked for any of the databases on military aviation accidents.
So I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the safety centers for the Air Force, Army and Navy, which includes the Marine Corps. (I gave up on the Coast Guard after numerous telephone calls and requests went unanswered.) Each service has its own database, and, though there are some similarities, the databases differ significantly from one another, even though some aircraft are flown by more than one service.
Major civilian aviation accidents are investigated by an independent body, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the results of NTSB investigations are made public. But major military aviation accidents usually result in two separate internal investigations: One done by one or more people who produce a public report, and the other, a more through investigation, done directly through one of the military safety centers.
Interviews, findings, recommendations and conclusions of the second investigation the one done through a safety center - are secret, and the courts have upheld this secrecy for years under the so-called Machan Privilege. Factual information, however, is not protected under the Machin Privilege.
So from the beginning, getting information from the safety centers was not easy. I negotiated for months over what was factual and what was protected under the Machin Privilege.
In the end, I got much more than expected. Though the databases differed greatly from one another, each service provided similar types of information: Dates and times of accidents, locations, types of aircraft, cost of accidents, types of injuries, names of crewmembers and even the names of parts believed to have failed. With the identity or parts suspected of failing, I had indications of what the secret safety investigation believed caused accidents - information usually kept from the public under the Machin Privilege.
Under the surface
But reading the databases wasn't easy. Anything military usually is filled with acronyms and coded language, and military aviation is padded with additional layers of technical jargon. Because of this, stories on military aviation require additional fact-checking, which should include a review by a military aviation expert.
Dave Gulliver, who assisted with some of the data analysis, and I discovered that what appeared to be true on the surface often wasn't necessarily the case. For example, one part that appeared to have been linked to dozens of Army helicopter accidents turned out to be landing skids, something that frequently breaks during crash landings but is rarely the cause.
Using the parts tables, we were able to link a single part or a single type of problem to dozens of accidents, concentrating on parts that eventually caused major accidents. In one case, we found that hydraulic problems in the Sea Knight helicopters had caused more than 71 emergencies and accidents from 1988 through July 1998. Nearly all of the cases involved the utility hydraulic pump, and in at least three cases, helicopters were destroyed and crews barely escaped with their lives.
The Navy database even had a "reoccurring problem narrative," tracking problems such as those in the Sea Knight that occurred more than once. One field actually totaled the numbers of times a problem had occurred, and the reoccurring problem narrative added comments, sometimes from commanders concerned that the problem had not been fixed.
The Air Force database had an engine table, complete with serial numbers of engines involved in accidents. With this table, we were able to track engines that had been in more than once accident. We found one engine that had been on three F-16s in less then four months. Twice the engine was removed after pilots complained of smoke and fumes in the cockpit, and finally the engine was put on a third jet, which crashed into a South Carolina neighborhood, killing one man and injuring seven others.
Beyond numbers
Using the information we gathered from the database, we then sought the lengthy reports on the accidents, filing more than 150 Freedom of Information Act requests with the various services. We also spent months tracking down crewmembers, relatives of victims, attorneys and other with information about the accidents. One of the most interesting aspects of the reporting came when we shared what we had learned from the computer records and accident reports with pilots, accident investigators and other people who had investigated the accidents. Their explanations greatly enhanced our ability to search the databases for the more significant problems and disregard other problems that - although they appeared significant - actually were minor. Pilots who survived accidents and the relatives of pilots who were killed frequently had no idea of the findings we had discovered on the databases. Several people explored legal action as the results of telephone calls from the Dayton Daily News concerning our findings, and at least one attorney changed his lawsuit, adding to it a company our records showed produced parts the Army had questioned.