ANATOMY OF A CRASH

Pilot's Navy jet plunges into bay

Randall McNally's plane was scheduled to be junked just weeks before crash

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By Russell Carollo
Dayton Daily News

The life of Lt. Cmdr. Randall E. McNally II was soaring the day he climbed into the cockpit of an A-6E Intruder jet near San Francisco Bay in 1994.

Navy Reserve pilot. Persian Gulf veteran. Notre Dame graduate. Full time Delta Air Lines pilot. Recent Stanford Law School graduate. Aspiring novelist. Hero. Engaged to a former model and Ice Capades skater.

MCNALLY FAMILY PHOTO MCNALLY, WEARING HIS Delta Air Lines captain's uniform, poses with his nephew Boris Randall Sagal in Los Angeles in 1992.

As McNally taxied his jet on Runway 31 at Alameda Naval Air Station Alameda, he was unaware that he'd achieved yet another goal: a letter notifying him that he had passed a state bar exam was on its way to him in the mail.

At three minutes before noon, on April 5, 1994, as the sun struggled to break through the clouds, dozens of ironworkers and office workers stopped for lunch alongside the bay, watching two Navy jets zooming overhead. Suddenly, McNally's two-seater jet seemed to fly out of control, and then, it became obscured in huge walls of water as it crashed into the bay.

"The plane sank very quickly, leaving behind debris all over the place," a fishing boat captain who pulled McNally from the water said in a statement to Navy investigators. "I knew the man was still alive, if only barely, because he stirred and gulped for air a few times.

"I tried to rouse him, and he moved his head. His face was bloodied and battered with lots of blood."

McNally's jet, like the rest of the A-6Es in his squadron, was weeks away from being junked at an aircraft boneyard. The shop maintaining the plane, Navy records show, was shorthanded at a time when the workload was heavy, and the plane was awaiting a number of repairs.

The Dayton Daily News, which examined never-before released records from the Naval Safety Center, found that the A-6E Intruder McNally and Lt. Cmdr. Brian R. McMahon of Portland, Ore., flew over San Francisco Bay was the subject of at least 10 technical directives -- four identified as "urgent" and some years old -- requiring maintenance work on the plane that was never done.

ONE PILOT'S STORY 'I was never worried about my brother in an aircraft in peacetime.' -- Sheila McNally-Hoy MCNALLY FAMILY PHOTO LT. CMDR. RANDALL E. MCNALLY II (right) gives the thumbs up as he and Lt. Cmdr. Brian R. McMahon prepare for takeoff in an A-6E Intruder on April 4,1994. The next day their jet crashed into San Francisco Bay.

Just eight days before the crash, mechanics found problems with the plane's stabilizer augmentor, an electronic system enabling the pilot to better operate the aircraft's most critical flight control systems. Less than half the wreckage was recovered, and the stabilizer augmentor was among the critical evidence never found.

"The stabilizer augmentor functioning really badly could have been a contributing factor," said Lt. Cmdr. Aladar Nesser, who conducted one of two Navy investigations into the crash. "This is an important piece of evidence that could have ruled out one of the final things that could have possibly occurred."

To fix the stabilizer augmentor problem, mechanics replaced a computer system that had "a high failure rate," Navy records show, and in the 14.7 hours McNally's jet flew prior to the crash, that computer system was changed twice, at least once by taking a computer from another aircraft.

Every year, military planes fall from the sky, and the reasons frequently are hidden in a cloud of secrecy or lie at the bottom of an ocean among the unrecovered wreckage.

"I was never worried about my brother in an aircraft in peacetime," said McNally's sister, Sheila McNally-Hoy, who works as a nurse with her father's Chicago plastic surgery practice. "It never occurred to me that his life was on the line every day he was on an aircraft carrier or on a military base.

"It's dangerous not only for the pilot but for everyone involved, the guys on the deck. That's why all the people in the military are putting their lives on the line every day, not just in battle."

For McNally's family, the coming weeks would bring many questions and too few answers.