Parts Falling From Aircraft Are a headache for the Navy : Did Admiral’s Jet Drop Fuel Tanks on Runway?

Although it launched an ambitious program a year ago to document every incident of a part falling off any of its 6,000 aircraft, the Navy sometimes is reluctant to discuss specificcases.

This may be especially true when an episode proves embarrassing to an admiral.

Navy officials in San Diego this week said they were unable to provide the identity of a pilot who on Dec. 6, 1984,accidentally dropped two large fuel tanksfrom an F-14 Tomcat jet on the MiramarNaval Air Station runway.

According to Navy sources, Rear Adm. Thomas J. Cassidy Jr., then the commander of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet Fighter-Airborne Early Warning Wing, dropped the tanks upon take-off when he failed to notice a flashing red “automatic jettison” light. The light indicates that, unless a switch is turned off, the fuel tanks will be dumped as soon as the jet’s landing gear lifts from the ground.

Cassidy safely returned the F-14 to Miramar and the two fuel tanks incurred minor damage, sources told The Times.

Cmdr. Ron Wildermuth, a Naval air force spokesman in San Diego, said that flight records at Miramar do not contain the name of the pilot. Wildermuth confirmed that the jet was an F-14 and that the fuel tanks were lost on Dec. 6, 1984.

“The event happened,” Wildermuth said. “We really don’t have any details. We have not found any written reports of the incident.”

The Navy claim that it can’t provide the pilot’s name is “absolutely ridiculous,” said one Navy officer who is familiar with aviation procedures and the Cassidy incident.

“There is a flight record of every damn airplane, who flew it and when they flew it,” the Navy officer said. “They’ve got to log their flight time . . . Of course they know.”

Retired Vice Adm. Crawford A. Easterling, former commander of the Pacific Fleet’s naval air force, said Friday he had no knowledge of the incident.

“Normally, if Admiral Cassidy were flying an airplane and he dropped something like that, I’d hear about it,” Easterling said. “. . . I was never aware that Cassidy had done such a thing.”

Cassidy, who was reprimanded last year by Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. and later exonerated for his role in the purchase of $637 aircraft ashtrays, retired last year. Reached at his home in San Diego, Cassidy refused to confirm or deny that he piloted the F-14.

Cassidy told a Times reporter that reporting information from Navy records “is probably the best way to leave it.”

He added, “I’m not in the Navy anymore. I don’t want to comment. Whatever the record says, that’s what you ought to say. I’m not going to get involved.”

Asked to deny that he was the pilot, Cassidy responded by asking how it would be to his advantage to answer the question. A Times reporter said that if Cassidy hadn’t flown the F-14 the newspaper wanted to correct information gathered from sources.

“And what if I did do it?” Cassidy responded.