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Capt. Stan Sharp and Dr. Betsy Steinberger know what the King-56 widows are going through. Both ran into the same kind of frustrating, stonewalling military crash investigations the King-56 widows did.
Sharp and Steinberger--both Portland residents--lost loved ones in military plane crashes: Steinberger's husband died in a mysterious C-130 crash four years ago; Sharp's son was jettisoned into a tree at 200 mph by a Navy plane's ejection system in 1994.
Both were left with more questions than answers by the military's controversial crash investigations.
"The present system manages to combine secrecy and incompetence," Sharp says. "What a deadly combination."
If anybody could get answers to these troubling tragedies, it would seem to be Sharp, who practiced law in Portland for 25 years after retiring from the Navy, and Steinberger, a persistent Portland State University professor who's skilled in research methods and interviewing techniques.
But like the King-56 widows--who wrote Sens. Gordon Smith and Ron Wyden last week, saying they still can't get public records from the Air Force--Sharp and Steinberger also ran into a military information blockade.
Now, as the widows' plight gains publicity, Sharp and Steinberger see an opportunity for families of crash victims to unite to push for reforms in the way military accidents are investigated.
There are disturbing similarities in the stories of Sharp and Steinberger, who have not yet met but who both contacted Willamette Week after reading this paper's story on the King-56 crash ("Why Did These 10 Men Die?" WW, June 18, 1997).
Sharp's ordeal started almost three years ago when his son, Mark, a Navy instructor pilot, was training a student at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia.
While taking off July 23, 1994, the student made a mistake and stalled the T2C plane--an error compounded by the malfunction of the cockpit radio system, which prevented the student and instructor from communicating at a critical time in the short-lived flight.
Because the plane was about to crash, Mark Sharp activated the ejection system, which uses an explosive charge to blast the pilot and co-pilot out of the aircraft.
The student was ejected first and survived. Mark Sharp was ejected a half-second later--after the plane had turned on its side. "He was ejected horizontally and hit a tree," says his father. Mark Sharp, 32, died of massive internal trauma.
Stan Sharp says his son's commander told him the accident report would be completed in 30 days and would explain exactly what had happened.
But Sharp wasn't allowed to see a report until 10 months after his son's crash. Then, he says, what he saw was a "sanitized" report prepared solely to defend against a possible lawsuit. Federal law, he learned, allows the military to conduct two separate accident investigations--one that produces a public report, and another that produces a secret report not even parents and wives can view.
"I felt I had been had," says Sharp, a 1958 graduate of the Naval Academy.
The public report acknowledged that the student raised the plane's flaps early--stalling the plane--and that the cockpit communication system wasn't working. It concluded, however, that Sharp died because he "waited too long to initiate ejection."
Sharp's father started asking questions. "But the Navy wouldn't respond," he says. "I met with a stone wall."
So he kept digging. He learned something that never came up in the public report--the plane's ejection system was the oldest and slowest on any Navy aircraft, taking twice as long (1.9 seconds) as the next-slowest plane. In fact, Sharp's son was the 25th instructor or student pilot killed ejecting from the T2C.
Sharp came to the conclusion that the military skimps on safety--an opinion expressed by other critics, such as Gen. Joel Hall, the former Air Force director of safety.
"Instead, our admirals and generals are electing to buy expensive new aircraft and weapons," says Sharp. "Safety has a very low priority."
Even more vexing to Sharp is the way investigations are handled when an accident occurs. "The investigators are completely over their heads," he says. "An accident board is put together with ordinary pilots...and their career is on the line if their boss does not want an area investigated or does not like a particular line of questioning."
Steinberger agrees. Her criticism springs from a 1992 crash that killed her husband, a Vietnam veteran and experienced pilot known for his expertise in the C-130, the same kind of plane as King-56, which crashed off the Oregon coast in November killing 10 airmen.
Lt. Col. John Steinberger's C-130 was flying low over West Virginia hills for unexplained reasons when its left wing caught a power cable and the plane exploded in a fiery crash. An Air Force investigation blamed the crash on the crew for departing from their prescribed course and flying so low.
Betsy Steinberger learned, however, that the plane had electrical and hydraulic problems the day before the crash. She also learned that one crash witness said the plane looked like it was in trouble before it hit the power cable. But Air Force investigators glossed over the mechanical problems and claimed that the plane's most recent maintenance records had been destroyed in the crash.
Steinberger, who was completing her doctoral dissertation in education policy at the time and was keenly tuned to interviewing and research techniques, felt the investigation was flawed.
Her husband was not the risk-taking, ridge-running type. The father of two teen-age girls, Steinberger, 45, was known for his conservatism as a pilot. His wife thinks he was flying low because his 28-year-old C-130 was having mechanical problems.
But she couldn't get reports of the plane's problems, nor would the Air Force give her a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder.
"I tried for two years to get that transcript," says Steinberger. "I was told it was a secret government document and there was no way I'd ever get it."
Steinberger says her husband had predicted that if he ever did crash, the Air Force would blame it on crew error. "The buck gets passed," Steinberger has since concluded, "until it lands in the lap of someone who can't pass it. That's where it stops."
Steinberger says she wondered, in the course of the last four years, if she would ever become a "crusader." In the wake of the King-56 crash, she thinks she finally has an answer. "My faith says it's not just chance that we are all here together in Portland with similar experiences," she says.
"I'll do whatever I can to change C-130s and the investigation process," she continues. "We're a lot further ahead now than ever before. Politically there are open doors. It's just tragic that it's taken so many accidents, lives and pain to get where we are now."
Sharp also agrees with critics who say investigations should be done by a independent, non-military agency like the National Transportation Safety Board. "It doesn't have to be NTSB," he says. "But it should be politically independent. The public must have the facts. My concern is not only as a father but as a Navy captain."
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