Wing Decertified, COs Sacked For Nuke Mistake

Posted 10/19/07 21:55
By MICHAEL HOFFMAN

The Air Force relieved the 5th Munitions Squadron commander at Minot immediately after the incident. On Friday, it announced that three more commanders have been sacked. They are:

• Col. Bruce Emig, wing commander, 5th Bomb Wing, Minot Air Force Base;

• Col. Cynthia M. Lundell, commander, 5th Maintenance Group, Minot Air Force Base; and

• Col. Todd C. Westhauser, commander, 2nd Operations Group, Barksdale Air Force Base.

Emig is also the installation commander at Minot.

An “erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards” at the two bases led to five major procedural errors at Minot, which resulted in a weapons loading crew accidentally loading a pylon of nuclear armed air-launched cruise missiles on the wing of a B-52 bomber. The mistake wasn’t discovered for 36 hours, long after the plane had touched down at Barksdale, said Maj. Gen. Richard “Dick” Newton, deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and requirements, and a former 5th Bomb Wing commander, who was tasked to brief the findings.

Since Aug. 30, some 65 airmen of varying ranks — lieutenant colonel and below — have lost their certification in the personnel reliability program, which the Air Force uses to oversee the character of airmen who handle nuclear weapons, said Lt. Col. Ed Thomas, an Air Force spokesman. The large-scale nature of the disciplinary actions points to the widespread nature of the problem.

Lt. Gen Norman Seip, commander of 12th Air Force and Air Forces Southern Command, has been tasked by the head of Air Combat Command to review the investigation and look into whether any airmen involved in the incident should be charged with a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or if other disciplinary actions are warranted.

In addition, the 5th Bomb Wing has been decertified from handling Advanced Cruise Missiles or nuclear warheads and suspended from any tactical ferry operations, Newton said.
“This was a failure to follow procedures, procedures which have proven to be sound,” Newton said.

FIVE STEPS TO FAILURE

Using the same briefing presented to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates earlier Friday, Newton summarized the five mistakes made by airmen that led to the incident and offered a timeline of events.

The first mistake occurred at the beginning of an operation to transport 12 Advanced Cruise Missiles on a B-52 Stratofortress bomber from Minot to Barksdale, part of a Defense Department program to decommission 400 of these missiles in the U.S. stockpile.

On the morning of Aug. 29, airmen assigned to the Minot weapons storage area were supposed to pick up and transport two pylons to a B-52 assigned to Barksdale. Each pylon is a self-contained package of six cruise missiles that can be quickly mounted to the wing of a Stratofortress. But the pylon had not been properly prepared, and the airmen failed to examine all the warheads on the missiles mounted to the pylons.

Newton confirmed after the briefing that cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads are not stored with cruise missiles armed with conventional warheads. Simply, certain pylons of cruise missiles have nuclear warheads, while others have dummy warheads that are essentially dead weight.

The second error occurred when “crews operating the trailer that was tasked with moving the pylons to the B-52 began hooking up while the required pylon inspection was still underway,” Newton said.

This played a part in mistake No. 3, when the airmen failed to verify the payload of the missiles mounted on the pylon that they hooked up to be transported to the B-52, Newton said.

Then, before the cruise missiles should have been transported to the aircraft, the munitions control center “failed to assess a database, as required, that would have alerted them that one of the pylons was not properly prepared for transfer,” Newton said.

Due to the first four mistakes, the nuclear warheads were unknowingly towed out to the flight line at 9:44 a.m. on Aug. 29 without any of the increased security initiatives used when nuclear warheads leave a storage facility.

The warheads were loaded onto the B-52 and sat on the flight line, which officials said was secure.

Airmen did have one last chance to catch their mistake before the B-52 took off, but “the Barksdale-assigned B-52 instructor radar navigator neglected to check all missiles loaded for transport as required,” Newton said. “The instructor radar navigator performed only a spot check and only on the right pylon, the one that had been properly prepared for transport.” This marked the fifth and final error, according to the Air Force investigation.

At 8:40 a.m. on Aug. 30, the B-52 took off on its 1,100-mile flight to Louisiana, landing there at 11:23 a.m. It sat on the flight line with the nuclear warheads still on its left wing for more than eight hours before munitions personnel, who followed correct procedures, unloaded the weapons and discovered the enormous mistake.

Despite the severity of the problems discovered, Air Force officials continue to reassure the public that the nuclear weapons were never out of airmen’s hands, but they acknowledged that the standard security procedures for handling nuclear weapons did not occur.

The investigation found this to be an isolated incident, and corrective measures are being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

“This was an unacceptable mistake and a clear deviation from our exacting standards,” said Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne, who led off the press briefing. “We hold ourselves accountable to the American people and want to ensure proper corrective action is taken.”

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=3123605&C=america