Even when it acts on a potentially deadly problem, the military frequently chooses small, measured responses, postponing more difficult solutions until the same problem leads to more accidents.

After the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter crashed in Alabama in 1993, the Army issued a technical bulletin requiring mechanics to use new procedures to bleed air from the fuel system.

DAN MCCOMB/FOR THE DAYTON DAILY NEWS 'IF THEY KNEW SOMETHING was wrong with it, why did they let it go on?' asked Ernest Aguilar, whose son Lt. Michael A. Aguilar was killed when an OH-58 helicopter crashed into a Nevada hillside.

Months later, after Lt. Michael A. Aguilar and Capt. Kenneth Sexton were killed in another OH-58 crash, Army technicians recommended further steps to keep air from the fuel system, including the possible introduction of a vent.

Some aircraft, however, fly for years or decades as the military struggles with persistent mechanical problems.

For years, the military struggled to prevent engine problems that plagued the AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter.

There were two types of malfunctions: rollbacks, causing the engine to roll back to idle; and flameouts, the sudden loss of engine power -- different problems that can be linked to a single cause.

In October 1995, a AH-1W Super Cobra helicopter from Camp Pendleton, Calif., suffered the eighth engine malfunction by the same squadron in a little more than a year. Mechanics first suspected water in a wiring harness, but when they took the helicopter up, the same engine flamed out again.

The Super Cobra has two engines, so losing one is not necessarily critical. In 1995 and 1996, however, the Navy investigated reports of dual engine failures.

In one of those cases, on April 18, 1996, an AH-1W from the Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, Japan, suffered a dual engine failure.

Michael Browne	Michael Aguilar

Maintenance personnel in Japan checked a fuel switch. They swapped engines. They replaced the engines. But they couldn't fix the problem. So the engines were sent to General Electric "for investigation."

A year later, on March 25, 1997, an AH-1W from the USS Nassau reported its number 2 No. 2 engine had failed, prompting his commanding officer to write: "This is the second rollback in four months on this engine in this aircraft. . . . This hazard is being addressed. . .with no fix in sight."

By March 1997, the military had documented more than 70 rollbacks and flameouts involving the Super Cobra.

Less than two months later, Alice Ruff was sitting at her desk at Ruff House Ministries about 15 miles southeast of downtown Dallas when she spotted a Super Cobra helicopter that appeared to be in trouble.

"I saw it come over the tree," she said.

Twenty minutes after takeoff, the helicopter crashed in a field near a high school, killing both pilots. The helicopter, however, missed the fiveacre ministry property, which includes dormitories housing homeless families.

"We're a Christian organization," Ruff said. "We don't call it luck. We call it blessed. But I felt bad for the people in it."

BRIAN PHILLIPS/FOR THE DAYTON DAILY NEWS JAMES BROWNE SR. and his wife, Patricia, place roses on the casket of son Maj. Michael J. Browne, who was killed when his Cobra helicopter crashed in a field near Dallas, Texas. 'It doesn't take but a word or a thought for someone to cry,' Browne's father said.

Maj. Michael J. Browne, the father of two girls and a combat veteran of Desert Storm and Somalia, and Lt. Robert B. Straw, also a husband and father, were killed.

"It doesn't take but a word or a thought for someone to cry," Browne's father said. "His wife is alone taking care of the girls."

A Navy investigation found that the helicopter "was not safe for flight and should have been grounded" before it left Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. near Fort Worth, Texas. The investigation found that there were outstanding "urgent" technical directives for work on the aircraft -- at least two of them aimed at preventing engine failures.

Rear Adm. Dirren, who reviewed Naval Safety Center records of the accident at the request of the Dayton Daily News, said: "We blew it."

By the time of the Dallas crash, the Navy had assembled a special "tiger team" to investigate the cause of the engine problems.

"The tiger team was window dressing," said Dallas attorney John Howie, a former Navy pilot who now represents the Browne family in a lawsuit against Bell and General Electric Co. Inc., which manufactured the engine. "Somebody was going to die. It was predicted before this crash.

"If the helicopters cannot be flown safely, you park them."

Adm. Dirren

Dirren said that the Navy never found the exact cause of the Dallas crash.

On May 5, 1998, a year after the Dallas crash, an AH-1W assigned to the USS Wasp reported an engine flameout. A report on the incident says: "Since this incident, there has been another aircraft flameout occurring."

In November 1998, more than four years after the Navy begin documenting engine failures in the AH-1Ws, drains were installed to prevent fuel from building up in the engines, Dirren said, adding that the new drain was a result of the tiger team investigation.

"We know we have an issue (with rollbacks and flameouts)," the admiral said. "We think we got a fix."

COST A FACTOR WHEN LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS

Sometimes problems go unresolved because the military decides the solutions are too expensive.

"You look back at the risks," said Marine Corps Col. Roger Dougherty, who until earlier this year was aviation safety chief at the Naval Safety Center in Norfolk, Va. "What's the severity of the risks and what's the potential of it happening again?

"And then we have to make hard choices based on dollars and cents. If it's a high risk that's going to happen often, it gets fixed. That's the bottom line."

In the system used to ensure civilian aviation safety, independent federal regulators can mandate safety changes. In the military system, the services decide for themselves.

"I think the independence is a critical part of the investigation," said Gene L. Sundeen, chief of regional operations and general aviation for the federal National Transportation Safety Board.

"It's difficult to ask an agency to investigate itself and criticize itself. When an agency is asked to investigate itself, it often has an urge to hide problems."

Free to choose, the military has made some poor choices, writing problems off as not warranting expensive solutions only to find the same problems turn catastrophic.

By early this year, the Air Force had documented 11 in-flight failuresof afterburners on Pratt & Whitney F-100-220 engines, used on F-15 and F-16 fighters. The afterburner, or augmentor, fits into the exhaust section of the jet and provides extra power by shrinking the size of the exhaust while injecting and igniting additional fuel.

Pieces of sheet metal called stiffeners, each welded on in 70 places, are attached to the afterburner on the F-100-220 engine to keep it from buckling under the tremendous heat and pressure produced by the engine.

The Air Force found that vibration and aging caused the welds to split until eventually the afterburner cracked.

"The nozzle and augmentor actually came off," said Robert May, Jr., who as propulsion product manager is in charge of engines for the Air Force.

An afterburner used for engines on another type of F-16 is chemically milled, or attached without welds, May said, and the Air Force could have easily solved its afterburner problem by putting chemically milled afterburners on its F-100-220 engines, used on both the F-15s and F-16s.

But there was a catch.

"To retrofit this new augmentor...is 40 to 50 million dollars," May said, and that's just for the F-16s.

Forty to 50 million dollars is roughly the cost of a couple of F-16s.

The decision was put off. After all, none of the 11 in-flight failures had caused a major accident. The F-15s, which have two engines, continued to fly on one engine, and the F-16s, which have only one engine, were able to land before the problems turned catastrophic.

"We didn't rush to put these parts on because none of the events caused Class A (accidents)," May said.

That changed this year.

On Feb. 3, an F-16 piloted by a student from Luke Air Force Base, Ariz., crashed near Gila Bend, Ariz. No one was seriously injured, but the $20 million aircraft was destroyed.

The next month, on March 26, another F-16 from Luke Air Force Base crashed on private property near an Arizona freeway. The pilot ejected and no one was injured. The aircraft was destroyed.

Both F-16s had afterburners that were attached with welds. In each case, the afterburner broke free and the engine fell apart, igniting a fire as flying debris ruptured the fuel lines.

"Our risk analysis shows we were in error before," said Major Gen. Gideon, the Air Force Safety Center commander.

Maj. Derek Kaufman, a Luke AFB spokesman, said the Air Force now plans to replace the old afterburners, but it could take several years. Until then, he said, mechanics will do more comprehensive inspections.

"Inspections allow us to mitigate the risk, but we know the real fix is replacement parts," Kaufman said. "We can't manage risk through inspections forever."

Al Michaels, a national resource specialist for the Federal Aviation Administration, said that in similar situations involving civilian aircraft the FAA would issue a safety warning after one or two reports of parts falling off planes.

"We wouldn't have waited for three," he said.

Cost also was the reason the Navy denied a recommendation to install a safety feature following the Dec. 17, 1992, crash that killed Lt. Cmdr. James E. Boyle when his Navy F-16 crashed in Idaho. An officer assigned to investigate the crash blamed pilot error, but he also found that the Navy wasn't using a computer software package that warns F-16 pilots when the plane is at a dangerous angle. The Air Force, the investigator found, already was using the software on its F-16s to warn pilots when they are flying close to terrain.

The Navy decided that installing the safety feature would not be "cost effective" because its F-16s would only be used for two more years.

RISKS NECESSARY TO COMPLETE MISSION

Sometimes the military's needs -- its missions -- are deemed more important than the risks posed by safety hazards.

"All U.S. Air Force missions and our daily routines involve risk," says a copy of "Risk Management" guidelines for Air Force officers. "Accept necessary risk required to successfully complete the mission or task."

"Avoiding risk altogether requires canceling or delaying the job, mission or operation, but is an option that is rarely exercised due to mission importance."

Maj. Eric Johnson learned this first hand.

Johnson, the aviation representative at the Pentagon for the Army Safety Center, had his body permanently scarred from an aviation accident.

Johnson's face and legs were burned on Feb. 23, 1993, when a UH-60A Blackhawk helicopter crashed in Germany, causing a 230-gallon external fuel tank to explode.

Johnson was on fire when he ran from the burning helicopter. Another officer's clothes were still smoldering when he stumbled from the wreckage. Four others, including Maj. Gen. Jarrett Robertson, the deputy commander of V Corps in Germany, were killed.

"Had there not been a fire, three of those four individuals would have survived," said Johnson, who filed suit against the helicopter manufacturer, United Technologies Corp. "I'm not speaking for the Army, only from a personal aspect."

The reason they didn't survive, Johnson said, is that the huge external fuel tanks, added to the helicopter so it can fly longer without landing, were never designed to survive a major crash. In addition, he said, the helicopter was never designed to fly regularly with the tanks.

An Army report on the accident says one passenger was killed by impact forces, and seven other passengers were either killed or injured by "thermal injuries."

Three years before the Germany crash, investigators working for a Congressional committee warned Congress that putting certain types of external tanks on Blackhawks could create "potential dangers."

"What we found out was that because of the weight of these things, the nose (of the helicopter) came near to touching the ground," said Lawrence Dandridge, one of four General Accounting Office investigators temporarily assigned to the committee staff. "We also found out they were not crashworthy fuel tanks, so we told them not to use them."

After the Germany crash, Johnson said he tried to convince the Army Safety Center to consider using crashworthy tanks, just as the congressional investigators had done three years earlier.

"I raised it as an issue," he said. "I think the safety center has always been interested in crashworthy tanks, but it just wasn't a top priority."

Instead of replacing the tanks, the Army decided to better educate pilots of potential problems in controlling the helicopter when the tanks are mounted.

"I guess they thought the training would help fix it," Johnson said.

Four years after the Germany crash, on July 8, 1997, a Blackhawk helicopter crashed into a stand of tall trees in North Carolina, rupturing both 230-gallon fuel tanks and killing all eight people aboard as the helicopter exploded into a fireball.

The Army issued a press release blaming the accident on pilot error. But accident investigators noted that the crew would have survived had it not been for the external fuel tanks rupturing and causing the fire.

In a separate written response to the Dayton Daily News, Army officials at the Pentagon said the external fuel tanks were designed to be jettisoned from the helicopter and not intended to be "directly involved in every helicopter crash."

"It is not likely that a tank designed with any different specifications would have made a difference in the crash," the written response says.

Following the Fort Bragg crash, the Army took further steps, requiring that missions involving Blackhawks using the external fuel tanks must be first approved by a high-ranking officer, usually someone with the rank of least a lieutenant colonel or above.

Nine years after the investigators warned Congress, the Army still allows Blackhawks to fly with the old tanks. Johnson said tests are under way on a safer tank.

"They continue to use them," Johnson said. "The leadership in the military is not forceful enough to simply say, 'It wasn't designed for that. Let's quit using it.' "