Flight Accidents in the 21st Century U.S. Air Force: The Facts of 40 Non-Combat Events

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Mid-flight non-combat malfunctions, mishaps, and blunders, occur frequently in the USAF during routine training and utility flights-sometimes unfortunately with the loss of life and regularly with the destruction of a military aircraft with a value of tens of millions-of-dollars. In the most extreme case presented here a B-2 Spirit bomber crashed soon after takeoff and was destroyed with a value of $2.2 billion. The events surrounding such accidents are meticulously gathered by USAF Investigators and a report is published in each case. Dr Bond has collected these reports over a number of years including some made available to him following FOI-Freedom of Information-requests made directly to the relevant US Air Base. The original official accident reports are rife with military jargon and acronyms rendering them near-impenetrable to the lay-reader. Dr Bond has written up forty of the most indicative reports as a series of accessible-but-comprehensive case histories in plain non-technical language. The causes of such blunders and mishaps are often surprising and sometimes horrifying: bird-strikes, joy-riding, unauthorized maneuvers, pilot disorientation, or more prosaically, an unseen binoculars-case blocking the action of a plane’s joystick or unexpected moisture in an air-pressure gauge.