That's a very interesting article that I'll follow up on. A pilot should be able to self-certify as unfit for a flight based on requirements. The ultimate backstop should be the pilot himself. I know that I would not be the rear seater with a guy that had only 4 hours of current flight time on a complex night Mission like this one. Given the culture, I can see how that won't work. It's that culture that's precisely the problem. The top-down nature of command totally fucks up feedback from the people who put their asses on the line.
The failures in maintenance and safety equipment are mind-boggling as often as they happen in our military.
I found the flight data information to be very telling, as a flight instructor.
His habitual right pedal should have been drummed out of him by then, a good flight instructor rests his feet on the rear set and monitors everything a student does. In the article they addressed it as a sign of stress, but an instructor puts a hell of a lot of stress on students and should weed that kind of thing out before you ever went into combat duty.
The turn coordinator is just an instrument to calibrate your ass and his ass should have been calibrated by then. A near centerline thrust jet like the F-18 should just about be feet on the floor in straight and level.
When you set aside all the other failures, that right pedal was really telling. When you do formation flight you use uncoordinated or cross controls to change position. In other words right pedal and left stick sets up a forward slip that moves you sideways in relation to the formation plane next to you. The flight data recorder documented that he was uncoordinated most of the time in his flight. Once he disconnected from the hose he lost his reference and it was a setup for failure.
That in no way takes away from the missed responsibilities of his command structure, it's just another part of it.
For me the most egregious thing was the lack of safety cover. A similar mission flown from a carrier would have had a helicopter hot on deck for that sort of thing and their asses were just hung out.
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