For three days, the family of Capt. Lucas Gruenther waited while rescuers searched for the F-16 pilot in the Adriatic Sea.
Gruenther,
the chief of flight safety for the 31st Fighter Wing at Aviano Air
Base, Italy, had ejected from his F-16 in poor weather off the Italian
coast. And while an Italian and American fleet combed the Adriatic,
Gruenther’s family gathered together and hoped for good news.
“It
was terrible weather, terrible visibility,” Gruenther’s mother, Romel
Mathias, said of the January 2013 search. “They didn’t have a rescue
plan for him.”
Like all other Air Force planes equipped with
ejection seats or parachute packs, Gruenther’s contained what was
supposed to be a lifeline — the AN/URT-44 locator beacon to help search
and rescue crews find a downed pilot.
But for Gruenther and nine
other pilots outfitted with the beacon since it went into service in
2011, the locator failed. Searchers recovered his body three days after he ejected. An investigation found he died during the ejection.
“It
cost our family three days of hell, basically, not finding him,”
Mathias said. “I just can’t understand why, when they knew that so many
of [the beacons] were not in correct working order, that they would let
those guys fly with those.”
The Air Force spent $30 million for
17,000 of the beacons in 2009, with deliveries finalized in 2010. Two
years after the first beacons were installed, crash investigators began
noticing that they had not worked in multiple crashes. In fact, the
beacons failed 10 times in 22 ejections, according to a review of crash
reports since the beacons were installed. Two of the failures were
caused by external issues, such as problems with how the beacon was
packed or the impact of the ejection, the Air Force said. When tested on
the shelves, the URT-44 has a 24 percent failure rate, according to Air
Force documents.
Now, the Air Force faces spending $69 million to start over with all new beacons.
“I
just can’t believe that with all of the technology now, with all of the
avalanche finders you can go find for 300 bucks, that they would let
those guys fly with those,” Mathias said.
Aircrew 'guardian angel'
The Air Force announced its plans to purchase the AN/URT-44 beacon
from prime contractor Signal Engineering Inc. in 2008. The previous
beacon, the AN/URT-33, was in the entire fleet, but it was not
compatible with changesto frequencies used by the Air Force’s search
and rescue satellite system.
Signal Engineering “met all required
performance parameters” following “the successful completion of rigorous
field trials and environmental testing,” the San Diego-based company
announced in a 2009 news release.
“The state of the art AN/URT-44,
the guardian angel of the aircrew, has become the personnel locator
beacon of choice for the United States Air Force,” states a training
video produced by Signal Engineering, sent to the Air Force and publicly
viewable on YouTube.
The company’s president, John Thompson, said
he believes the problems were identified during testing, and has told
the Air Force his company can fix them. However, the Air Force largely
cut off contact with the company once service officials decided to
replace the beacon, he said.
“We’ve done the best we can. We can
do as much as we are allowed to mitigate the circumstance, but we don’t
have access to the information,” he told Air Force Times in a Jan. 30
interview.
By August 2010, the service finished installing the new
beacon in all aircraft with ejection seats, except the F-35, and in
parachute packs for aircrew in planes such C-17s and C-130s, said Col.
Aaron Clark, the deputy director of the global programs power
directorate, agile combat support, at the Pentagon, who oversees beacon
procurement.
The first real test for the beacon came April 1,
2011. The pilot of an A-10C assigned to the 81st Fighter Squadron at
Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany,
was forced to eject during a training flight. According to an Air Force review of the mishap, the beacon failed.
“The
[pilot’s] personal locator beacon’s power was extremely low during
transmission,” the investigation report for the crash states. “The
[wingman] was only able to hear the [beacon] when within two nautical
miles of the crash and no Air Traffic Control agency was able to hear
the beacon.”
The pilot crashed near a village, and locals found the wreckage and helped the pilot before search and rescue crews arrived.
Over 2½ years, the AN/URT-44 beacon failed nine more times.
The
Air Force expects to replace the entire inventory by 2015, Clark said.
Contractors placed their bids in January, and the Air Force is reviewing
its options and planning more rigorous tests for the beacons.
“We
still fly with it, it’s the beacon we have today,” Clark said. “. . .
If there are promising beacons, which we expect there are, we will do
testing to have confidence that we aren’t going to buy into a similar
problem that we already have.”
Turning point