Collision of AF Jet, Cargo Plane Blamed on Controller Mistakes

A collision between an Air Force F-16D jet fighter and a C-130 cargo plane last March in North Carolina, in which 23 servicemen were killed and 100 were injured, was caused mainly by the mistakes of an inexperienced Air Force air controller, a formal investigation has found.

Authorities said Tuesday they had not decided whether to bring disciplinary action against the air controller, who apparently already had been undergoing retraining because he had been judged to lack the necessary aptitude to continue in the high-skill job.

The report is not scheduled to be made public until next week but officials who have seen it said it will show that, while other factors contributed, the primary fault rested with the controller for mishandling landing instructions to the two planes.

The collision, which took place over Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, sent wreckage plunging onto the runway, where it skidded and slammed into a parked C-141 cargo aircraft, igniting the fuel tanks of the big transport plane.

Most of the injuries were suffered by Army paratroopers from nearby Ft. Bragg, N.C., who had been preparing to board the C-141 to make a training jump. The C-130 was not carrying troops.

The crash, which officials described as one of the worst military air accidents in recent years, marked the third such embarrassment for the Air Force in the last few months.

Only a few weeks after that incident, two Air Force F-15Cs mistakenly shot down a pair of U.S. Army helicopters over northern Iraq, killing 26 persons. And early in March, an Air Force AC-130H “Spectre” gunship crashed in Kenya, on a routine mission to Somalia.

None of the crash reports has been made public but officials said that in the case in Iraq, the pilots of the two F-15Cs misidentified the U.S. Blackhawk helicopters as Iraqi Hinds. The results of that investigation are to be made public next month.

Those familiar with the report on the collision at Pope said the controller erred in at least two major ways: he failed to warn the F-16D early enough and he mixed up the call sign of the C-130 with that of another plane that already had landed, leaving it without instructions.

As a result, officials said Tuesday, the pilot of the F-16D became confused and was unaware that he was too close to the C-130. When the fighter hit the larger airplane, it sheared off the horizontal stabilizer on the C-130’s starboard wing. The impact also destroyed the sensors in the nose of the F-16D that feed electronic data to the flight computer, leaving the electrically steered fighter virtually uncontrollable.