Originally Posted by
HerkDriver
Last thoughts on this thread...I was in the squadron, and deployed, when our C-130 crashed in Al Jaber. McD was indeed our CC at the time. I went to AIS a year or so after the accident, and was actually the person that sat down and explained to "KJ" what the AF was trying to do to the crew. That was on a Friday...KJ was up in Little Rock that following Monday to talk with the crewmembers. Regardless of your thoughts on what the crew could have or should have done better, the AF was using some faulty logic in their attempts to prosecute the front-enders. The most memorable quote from the hearings when the AF tried to hammer the AC was when the prosecutors had KJ on the stand and were trying to lecture him about the "intent" of 11-217. KJ replied, "look on the front page of the reg. I can tell you exactly about the intent of the reg...I wrote it".
Having went through the FTU in the summer of 2000, when the Article 32 was going on and then assigned to that unit, I have spent much time studying that mishap, and all I can say is this: that crew was set up to fail with respect to their schedule and when I was in the desert in 2005, it hadn't changed much. In fact the flight doc suggested I might be addicted to Ambien and referred me to their paphlet which read "get into a normal sleep schedule." I had such a laugh at that I told him to email it to our schedulers, who moved us from a day line to a night line back to a day line with min crew rest routinely.
You can have all the training and experience/knowledge of the regs, but if you are too tired to react, you are too tired to react.