The Defense Department and its three services are working on a memo of understanding (MOU) to improve response times and the communication of information and clarify “who’s in charge” at accident investigation sites.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said Wednesday the memo is in regard to the accident investigation that followed the F-35 fire in June. A fire to the jet as it was about to takeoff lead the Air Force to ground its fleet of F-35As June 23. Pentagon officials categorized the fire as due to an “extensive rub” of a third-stage fan blade. The F135 engine on the F-35 is developed by Pratt & Whitney of United Technologies Corp. [UTX].
DoD has protocols to follow for accident investigations to protect the integrity of evidence, but Welsh said the three services and the Pentagon didn’t know who were the right people to communicate with accident investigation information, slowing down the delivery of critical information. Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Allen Herritage said Wednesday any kind of organization with multiple bureaucracies involved, like DoD, they’re all bureaucracies with their own protocol to start a process like accident investigation. Herritage said the question was, simply, “who’s in charge?”
“People from all those organizations were at Eglin (Air Force Base, Fla.), they’re there all the time and they were actually there with the interim safety board,” Welsh told reporters at the Pentagon. “But no one really knew who was officially the connection to the Navy, the Marine Corps or the JPO.”
Welsh said DoD stakeholders failed prior to the incident to put together a plan to make sure key representatives from “the right places” would be part of the process so everyone would have access to the important data quickly. This, Welsh said, would have allowed government representatives to make airworthiness certification decisions, would have provided Pratt & Whitney with data to start working the root cause analysis (which has not been determined) and would have helped JPO know exactly how the mishap affected their test program.
“The next time this happens, there’s a very quick response,” Welsh said. “Everyone knows exactly who is authorized, who can get information, how quickly (and) how we’re going to manage it. We’ll fix it, this won’t happen again.”
Welsh said the problem with an accident scene is someone has to be instantly accountable for making sure evidence is controlled and not affected in a “negative way.” Taping off the area and isolating evidences fields so evidence wouldn’t be destroyed, Welsh said, is one way to do this. Welsh said it takes about 36 hours to get the “full time” president for the investigation at the site and then have experts arrive to start forming the accident investigation board. Welsh called this 36 hour timetable “very fast.”
Welsh also said one unique event that took place as the F-35 fire was being investigated was that on the morning of the second day, Air Force Gen. Robin Rand, head of the service’s Air Education and Training Command (AETC) and head of the F-35 investigation board, approved the interim safety board president to have the flight recorders removed from the airplane before the safety board arrived.
Welsh said until data from the flight recorder is available, trying to piece together what happened is “virtually impossible,” unless there was clear, visual evidence of the root cause. Welsh said removing the flight recorders from the airplane and sending them to the contractor on the second day was “way ahead” of a normal timeline.
Welsh and Air Force Secretary Deborah James called their briefing Wednesday to announce the Air Force’s “Call to the Future,” its strategic path for the next 30 years. Welsh said “Call to the Future” was the first of three documents the Air Force would issue as a long-term and wide-ranging plan. The next document to be released is the Air Force’s master plan, he added.
“Call to the Future” is the strategic framework that will guide Air Force planning and resourcing over the next several decades, according to a service statement. The framework has three main elements: a long-term future that provides the vectors and imperatives necessary to guide planning activities, a 20-year resource-informed plan and a 10-year balanced budget based on fiscal projections.
James the nuclear enterprise is the Air Force’s “number one” priority and that is why the service is shifting resources and personnel. There are eight critical specialties within the nuclear career field and they have to be staffed at 100 percent, James said. The Air Force is taking steps to make the nuclear career field more attractive for airmen after a cheating scandal rocked the service earlier this year.
The F-35 is developed by Lockheed Martin [LMT] with subcontractors Northrop Grumman [NOC] and BAE Systems, along with Pratt & Whitney.