The Full Story Behind the F-14 Tomcat Crash in Nashville

stacy bates graduated from tyner high school in chattanooga in 1980 where he was a star athlete academic standout and king of the homecoming court he was appointed to the u.s naval academy and graduated with the class of 1984 because he didn't have 20 20 vision but was motivated to be part of naval aviation he selected naval flight officer as his warfare specialty choice stacy earned his nfo wings in october of 1985 and began his training as a radar intercept officer in the f-14 tomcat with vf-124 which was the f-14 training squadron at nes miramar upon completion of the syllabus at vf-124 stacy reported to the aardvarks of vf-114 towards the end of his tour in vf-114 it came time to consider follow-on orders and the navy had just published a message looking for candidates to apply for the nfo to pilot transition program this was specifically for naval flight officers in the s3 ea6b a6 and f14 communities so stacy now known by his call sign sprout applied for the program and because his record was very good he was accepted so he left vf-114 and returned to pensacola this time for pilot training the nfo to pilot transition program more affectionately known as the retread program was created because the navy was losing a lot of pilots to the airlines in those years the idea was that because nfos have familiarity with their various aircraft and the general carrier environment as a function of serving an entire tour that they would show up with an aptitude and an attitude that would make pilot training very streamlined thereby saving the navy time and money and providing a stop gap to this pilot retention problem that was going on the results ultimately were mixed there are success stories my first pilot in vf-32 was a retreat a guy named rex orr i know other tomcat pilots like dave venlette who went on to be a three-star he's definitely a success story and there are a number of others one of my patreon patrons lieutenant commander sparky sparks started his navy career as a prowler ecmo and as he describes it he had both an advantage and in some cases being a retread was a disadvantage particularly with some of the instructors who were from the single seat community another general issue with retreads was they would be senior officers but junior pilots so they would show up to the squadron as either a very senior lieutenant or a very junior lieutenant commander depending on how quickly they got on the step they may or may not leave that first tour as a flight lead or a mission commander the other things that you need to do to stay on track so results were mixed for these retreads in terms of professional trajectory in sparky's case he left that first a6 tour as a pilot he was a flight lead he was a mission commander but he wound up going back to the prowler community and for his final tour he wound up actually participating in desert storm but ultimately in sparky's case even though he had a thousand hours as an ea 6b ecmo 1000 hours as an intruder pilot and a thousand hours as a prowler pilot his timing didn't work out so he didn't screen for squadron command and wound up retiring as a lieutenant commander so no complaints from sparky he had a fantastic career but as a function of this nfota pilot transition he was limited in what he was able to do on active duty now in stacy bates's case the final report stated that he had been a weak student in pilot training exhibiting difficulty in scanning cockpit instruments and committing numerous procedural mistakes so let's note at this point that another part of the retread program was it was assumed that regardless of how you performed in pilot training you were going to go back to the community you came from so this was different than flight students who were going through pilot training without any fleet experience that was very much a merit system occasionally there was what we call a quality spread where number three would want to go into tomcats but generally aircraft particularly aircraft that were a challenge to fly like the tomcat and the prowler were a function of how well you did in flight school that wasn't the case for retreads so stacy bates got his pilot wings went back to the rag at miramar and wound up in vf 213. his first pilot deployment with the squadron was aboard the uss abraham lincoln where they cruised to the persian gulf and participated in operation southern watch which was the patrolling of the no-fly zone south of the 33rd parallel over iraq as he had been during his tour in the aardvarks as a rio he was regarded as a very good naval officer very focused on being the best tactician he could be on knowing everything he could know he studied tactics and procedures and aircraft systems very hard and remained somebody who's very concerned about physical fitness and nutrition he was a good enough aviator and officer to be selected to be the squadron's pilot to go to top gun during the turnaround between deployments and that's no minor accomplishment so he successfully completed the top gun curriculum and got back to the squadron in time for the second deployment now by this time it's 1994 and vf 213 starts to have some problems starting with the mishap involving cara holtgreen who was one of the first female pilots attached to a sea going f14 squadron i documented that mishap in a previous episode so if you have not seen that please check it out that crash was followed by another vf-213 mishap in 1994 which happened when one of their airplanes was doing a supersonic flyby past the uss john paul jones and the engine compressor section came apart that pilot in rio were able to get out of the airplane were actually picked up by the destroyer that they were flying by and then in april of 1995 sprout was flying an air combat maneuvering sortie when the airplane departed and went into a flat spin he and the rio wound up having to eject the subsequent mishap investigation and associated phenab which is field naval aviators evaluation board that every pilot goes through after that kind of mishap ruled that he was not at fault and he was returned to a flight status the squadron executive officer who was a real flew with him for five back in the saddle sorties and ruled that he was good to go subsequent to that sprout started to demonstrate some tendencies that were of concern particularly to a few of the squadron rios specifically he almost forgot to drop the flaps during a case one approach to the lincoln he jousted with a heavy tanker during an operation southern watch mission to the point that the rio was afraid that the airplane was going to sustain damage then on a subsequent knight approach to the carrier he allowed the airspeed to decay to the point that the rio thought the airplane was going to stall these situations caused to the squadron rios to approach a couple of the squadron department heads and say they refused to fly with sprout again overall the knock on him was that he was quote unquote behind the airplane those department heads went to the squadron exo who had ruled that he was good to go and relayed that the rios were refusing to fly with sprout that exo went to the co and remember the co who was a pilot had endorsed bates's fenab as he was good to fly so the two of them took no official action in the wake of these concerns and instead directed the operations officer to not schedule sprout with those rios who were refusing to fly with him so they get back from that deployment and now they're operating out of their home base of nas miramar then in mid-january in 1996 sprout was flying a bombing mission with live ordnance on the airplane when he rolled in on a target without permission and almost hit another airplane that was the one that had permission to do the bombing run the ground safety observer had to abort the approach for both aircraft and was concerned enough about what had happened that he relayed the incident to the squadron ceo again nothing was done and then on january 26 1996 sprout and a first tour squadron rio named hogg higgins took a cross-country from nes miramar to nashville international airport where they were hosted by the tennessee air national guard sprout wanted to go to nashville because his family lived nearby as they had when he was in high school in chattanooga so he'd be able to spend some time with his parents on january 29 1996 sprout and hog planned to return to miramar from nashville and do a couple of low-level training missions along the way this picture of sprout and his parents was taken on that day now for the specifics of the mishap i'm referencing the testimony of captain dale snort snodgrass who viewers of the channel will remember was a legendary fighter pilot who died a few months ago in a private airplane crash snort was the fighter wing commander at this time so like every flight particularly every cross country sprout and hog had to file a dd-175 with base operations that indicated what their route of flight was going to be additionally sprout asked if he could do an unrestricted climb which gave him permission to do a high performance takeoff he was granted that permission so one can assume that hogg the rio was okay with that request so meanwhile sprout's parents had positioned themselves at a restaurant that had a great view of the runway all right let's go to the training aids airplane taking off towards the west gets to the end of the runway starts to take off roll goes to full afterburner at about 150 knots rotates breaks the deck goes to level flight for a low transition gear up flaps up travels about 6 000 more feet down the runway and then pulls three and a half g's to 50 degrees nose high enters the clouds at about 2000 feet certainly the crew anticipated based on the weather forecast that they would break out of the clouds at around 7000 feet however they never break out of the clouds or they didn't stay at this attitude long enough to break out at 7 000 feet so somewhere between going into the clouds and 5000 feet the airplane comes out of afterburner bates buns the airplane into a 80 degrees nose down position miss half investigators believe that he had vertigo and his inner ear was telling him that he was actually in a climb so he continued to push the airplane nose low until he got to about 80 degrees nose low now the other thing is as he pushed over the top with vertigo and came out of burner he also changed the airplane's heading by about 80 degrees so it went from west to south so he broke out of the clouds at 2 000 feet going 350 knots obviously he realized he was in deep trouble he immediately pulled the stick full left putting eight and a half g's on the airplane investigators believe that g-force caused the rio hog higgins to experience g-induced loss of consciousness and he passed out bates managed to get the airplane slightly nose high but he was still descending at a rate of 10 000 feet per minute when he hit a house two and a half miles south of the airport the airplane and the house were totally destroyed in the resultant fireball the pilot the rio and three civilians on the ground were killed so as you might imagine this was a very high visibility mishap because of the loss of civilian life near the international airport there was intense media scrutiny and as a result of that there was congressional oversight so the immediate steps that the chief of naval operations took at that time was to cancel the nfo to pilot transition program there were 11 aviators in the program who were allowed to continue but no others followed them in general the cno blamed what he called a halo effect to the retread program where because of their previous hours instructors and squadron leadership gave retread pilots credit for knowing more than they actually did about being a pilot as i said before that halo effect was not universally true for the retreat program there were a number of retreads who went on to fantastic careers as pilots in fact in several cases they went on to flag rank and as far as the decisions that were made about stacy bates during his time in vf-213 i turn to what snort said when asked a question by one of the lawmakers whether he should have continued flying after his phenom so snort says i think this individual was a very very good officer was a great human being it was a great asset to the squadron but he was a fairly senior officer but a fairly junior pilot again that was one of the liabilities of the retread program his performance as a pilot was though adequate never much above average and he worked very hard at what he did as you go through as a commanding officer or an operations officer or a wing commander it's a balancing act just like a football team or a baseball team occasionally we find pilots we've all done it that makes certain procedural errors they will make some airmanship errors and they will make some tactical errors and it is a question of picking those heirs and then training them and keeping them going along it's very difficult to say we should have stopped this individual to fly and i cannot really say it because i did not know him personally but there are indicators back there that say at least in that one accident his first accident the flat spin the phenam process did not look into his background quite as far as it probably should have but in his particular mentality to get back to this accident was one where he was very exceptionally meticulous in his pre-flight planning and this particular departure was out of sync with his normal way of doing business he was known to give extensive briefs and then go fly the mission exactly as briefed no one could ever recollect him attempting any kind of hot dog maneuver or any kind of airshow type of departure or even requesting an unrestricted departure so this was kind of out of the ordinary and that unpredictability is what makes it impossible to judge the acts of anyone in this case however the commanding officer of vf213 was relieved because of a lack of confidence due to this mishap and a number of other things that had happened in the previous months another black lion ceo wrote a tribute article to stacey bates in proceedings magazine that says in carrier aviation there are natural aviators and there are those who must work extremely hard to become as good as they can be often the natural aviators are not the best ones they work less hard than the less gifted ones to reach the same goals stacy worked tirelessly to establish himself among the very best through strict attention to establish procedures and rules he was not a maverick he was simply a young man trying to be the best in a highly competitive community that scrutinizes each member every day and seldom lets its pilots rest on their laurels and as the final thought here's what representative ike skelton said at the closing of this hearing i would like to express my deepest sympathies to the families of elmer and aydah newsom ewing ware those were the civilians killed on the ground navy lieutenant commander stacy bates and lieutenant graham higgins should also note that sprout left a wife and a baby daughter and that hog left a wife it is in their memory that i will work with the military and the federal aviation administration to be sure tragedies like this one did not happen again and it is in their memory that this episode is presented here all right that'll do it for this episode i look forward to talking to you again soon [Music] oh [Music] [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] [Music]

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 113,342

Keywords: Ward Carroll, F-14 Tomcat, LCDR Stacy Bates, Nashville Tomcat crash, military airplane crashes, DCS, Top Gun, aircraft carriers, U.S. Navy, fighter pilot, radar intercept officer, flight school

Id: tSSvXUz4unc

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022