Word: aircrafting
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...runway. The Air Force has grounded the 110-plane fleet for 10 different modifications in an effort to solve the mechanical problems. And in December, after TIME asked a series of questions about the T-3, acting Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters ordered a comprehensive review of the aircraft's purchase, testing and operation...
...Force training was a particular passion of General Merrill McPeak, the service's chief of staff in the early 1990s. McPeak, a fighter pilot who had flown with the Thunderbirds, the Air Force's precision-flying team, is now retired but still flies his own homemade, acrobatic RV-4 aircraft. "The T-41 is your grandmother's airplane," says McPeak of the T-3's predecessor. "Our mission is to train warrior-pilots, not dentists to fly their families to Acapulco...
...people who can do this job." Other Air Force officers point out that the plane has flown without an accident at an Air Force base at Hondo, Texas, where the instructors, who are civilians working under contract with the Air Force, have spent years flying small, piston-powered aircraft like the T-3. "If the engine quits, we know how to land the airplane and walk away from it," a civilian pilot at Hondo says. "The Air Force guys just know how to bail out when that happens." McPeak, a former F-15 pilot, suggests the fact that all three...
...academy runway and landed safely. "We want an effective flight-screening program, but a safe one," says General Lloyd Newton, head of the service's Air Education and Training Command in San Antonio, Texas, who ordered the grounding. "We've certainly bumped into some rough spots with this aircraft, but that doesn't mean it's a bad aircraft...
...Force Risking Lives of Trainees? Last year, the U.S. military lost pilots in aircraft ranging from F-114 fighters to C-130 transport planes. But a TIME magazine investigation finds that the most dangerous plane in the military may well be the Air Force's prop-driven T-3 trainer...