Guest Column by ANN Reporter Kevin "Hognose" O'Brien

We have all seen the video, or the photos. Absolutely chilling: the right wing folds up and away, the left one seems to twist down around the spar and away, and the wingless fuselage rolls inverted and plunges behind a wooded hill that draws a merciful curtain over the violent end of three good men and their machine. I'm glad that hill was there. If it hadn't been, I couldn't have avoided watching the last instant. The merciful hill spares us that.

The tanker drivers and their extended family of crews, operators, firefighters, wives and kids, have their own place where they gather on the 'net. (Included, sad to say, are their widows and orphans - it is a risky business, claiming over seventy crews since the 1960s).  I went there to post a condolence message. I am getting very good at condolence messages: eight from my regiment have fallen in the present war, and one of our veterans maintains a place where the community and the families can, well, share our feelings. But when I went to the tankers' site, I began to read it, and after a few minutes I could not bring myself to post a message.

Indeed, only one journalist has, and he (Wayne Sagar of AAFO) is someone who has spent some time around this community of heroes. I was acutely conscious of being an interloper, an outsider. I read the posts of these men's friends and family, feeling like a ghoul that crashed a stranger's funeral. What could I say to family of pilot Steve Wass? Or the survivors of Craig LaBare or Mike Davis -- that I grieve with them, as a fellow pilot? That I wish I had known these men? Do I tell them that they died to save other lives (they did) or that my religious belief assure me they are not truly gone (it does)? Do I tell them that we will learn the cause (we shall) and that all will fly safer for it, in memory of Steve, Craig and Mike, whom we did not know?

There is something horribly voyeuristic about looking at crash pictures. We ran one in Aero-News last June, showing Guy Bancroft-Wilson's P-63 stall/spin accident - in the instant before impact, you can see the elevator against the stop, holding the plane stalled… that's probably where I'd have it too, as the ground rushed up. And perhaps that is the secret to why pilots have such a guilty interest in crashes. It is so easy to put yourself in your fallen brother's pilot seat, if you have any imagination, on that last plunge to eternity.

Recently my imagination has seated me in each crew seat of that doomed C-130A tanker, and at the controls of the P-63, and in the pilot's seat of a Cessna 335 as Randy Carnahan struggled with partial panel using a small copilot-side attitude indicator. At some point there is nothing more the pilot can do - with the P-63 it was probably when a maneuver was entered too slow; with the 130 we won't know until the reports are in. (Maybe never; a similar accident in 1994 remains controversial). With Carnahan it is hard to say.

We pore over accident reports, and we tell ourselves that it is to prevent future accidents. I'm trying to get my ducks in a row for a graduate degree in safety, and working on a safety-related book, so I tell myself the "prevention" story. Accident prevention -- it lets me justify the dozens of books I buy. But the real reason is, I think, that we are all saying, "There but for the Grace of God go I." 

Ernest K. Gann was adamant that it was a question of fate, of luck. While Gann is a writer of considerable power, most of us don't accept that, quite. It leaves us too vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the Fates (who the ancient Greeks, perhaps on the same sheet of music as Ernest K., anthropomorphized as fickle women). One does not want to think that, whatever you do, it might avail you nothing. One wants a structure, a reason, a justification. The process of a healthy mind trying to find a framework, which in an unhealthy mind attaches all events to an elaborate conspiracy (and yeah, those guys are out of their Montana cabins, blaming the tanker crash on the CIA).

But what if Gann is right, and there is no framework but simply a process of chance, or a wiffle-tree of processes of chance, working to separate some from the physical world for no reason whatsoever? If that is what it is, we can't change it. A friend of mine once died taking a stroll alongside a lake. Many people who fear flying will die in car crashes. So you might as well fly… which makes me suspect that perhaps Gann's invocation of Fate -- his fatalism, literally -- might itself have been a defence mechanism. 

Not everyone has my reticence about posting a message to the flying firefighters. There is a healthy debate going on over the C-130A: safe or not? (At the tag end of their Air Force service, the USAF had its doubts and banned them from long overwater flights -- although that might have been maintenance more than safety. At press time they're grounded, while the FAA and the operators try to figure that one out themselves.) And there was one person -- Editor-in-Chief Jim Campbell will not let me use my preferred word for him here -- one amoral vulture who posted a chain letter. That's not quite as bad as girly-man Douglas Gantenbein, who last week launched a perfectly timed -- in Stale, oh excuse me, Slate - screed whining about the vast amount of money paid to parasites like, well, air tanker operators. Slick, Doug. Elegant, even.

I would sooner stand among those who fly, and who risk for whatever reason those few minutes or seconds where nothing can be done, than stand among those who sit at a desk and generate chain letters for a few dishonest dollars.

Should the Fates one day reach out their fickle arms to me, remember that it was my choice, to stand with Steve, Craig and Mike, with Guy Bancroft-Wilson, with Randy Carnahan, and with all the many that have gone before me into the air. May that day be long in coming, but if it comes I will stand tall to stand in such fine company. --Kevin O'Brien

Sidebar:

The plane that was lost was Hawkins and Powers' first C-130A tanker, N130HP. The company and crew were proud of the white ship with the jaunty red stripes. This picture shows it in happier days: http://www.wildlandfire.com/pics/air3/at130.jpg

This picture shows a sister ship: http://www.wildlandfire.com/pics/air4/herc78.jpg

These craft are known as Air Tankers 130 and 131 (every tanker has a unique call number, which usually doesn't match its N-number)

The crew members were:
Captain: Steven Ray Wass 
FO: Craig LaBare
Engineer: Mike Davis
They had flown together in the 1990s and again this season.

For those wishing to contribute for the survivors of this and other aerial firefighting mishaps:

ASSOCIATED AIRTANKER PILOTS MEMORIAL FUND
C/O; NEWHART BOOKKEEPING
711 D HEALDBURG AVENUE
HEALDBURG,CA. 95448
PHONE; 707-433-4866

Hawkins and Powers memorial fund

Hawkins & Powers Aviation has established a memorial fund for the families of T-130.  Donations will be matched by Hawkins & Powers and distributed to the families.  If you are interested in helping the families of Steve Wass, Craig LaBare and Mike Davis, please send your donations to Hawkins & Powers Aviation, Inc.  Attn:  Genny Anders P.O. Box 391 Greybull, Wyoming 82426