It was 9:31 am on a clear morning in Talavera la Real when suddenly things began to get ugly.
-No, this doesn't fly, uncle ... (student commander).
-I don't let the lever pull up, that's the problem.
-Let's see ... God, we keep going down, pull up, please.
-Well, we have to play ...
-We will have to get off the train (landing) and see what happens ...
The dialogue reproduced, rescued from the black box recordings, shows that something is going very wrong. And so much. They would end up crashing.
At the controls of the F-5, of the School of Hunting and Attack of the Air Force, was the commander instructor Ángel Álvarez Raigada and, sitting in the front cabin, the student Sergio Santamaría de Felipe, a 23-year-old young Ensign whose dream It was to become a fighter pilot. Professor and student ended up hitting the ground violently. The veteran pilot died instantly; His pupil's body was shattered . Given the images of the split and charred aircraft , one thinks that miracles exist. Because it was a miracle that Sergio kept all his members and came with a halo of life to the hospital.
-I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
It has been seven years in the dark until I can see that light. Because that of the apprentice is the story of a dream and also of a nightmare: four operations , entrances and exits in the ICU , months of hard rehabilitation and tears at the Hospital of Paraplegics of Toledo. Sergio, with 30 years old, can never fly again, but can design airplanes. He is about to graduate as an aeronautical engineer and wants to land in the new life. Forgetting as soon as possible of that damn defective piece of the F-5 in which he was flying and that, according to the judge who is carrying his case, was the cause of the terrible accident, of which eight officers, allegedly responsible, will have to be held accountable in a pioneer trial in Spain.
Parts that break in flight, landing gear that does not work properly, control commands that do not respond ... What is happening so that fatal accidents like Sergio's are repeated among teachers and students of the Air Force? Why do so many military planes fall? Are they checked badly? Not enough spare parts? Is poor maintenance the cause of them falling?
The last tragedy of a chain of accidents involving military aircraft occurred on September 18. It was a Tamiz light aircraft, from the General Air Academy, used for elementary education. If then the pilot died, Commander Daniel Melero, 50, and his third-year student Rosa Almirón, 20, just 30 days before another fatal accident ended the career of Commander Francisco Marín Núñez, 42, who piloted a C-101. In less than 30 days, three deaths and two devices destroyed. In this case it was the official training aircraft of the Air Force, designed and manufactured in Spain. Yuno of the most injured, whose service sheet accumulates an accident rate that has already claimed the lives of 14 pilots and the loss of 18 devices.
In just eight years - since 2012, when the tragedy of Talavera la Real - there have been nine fatal accidents, with the result of 16 deaths and nine aircraft destroyed: 2 Eurofighter; an F-18; an F-5; two C-101; a T-35 and two of Super Pumas, the Air rescue helicopter. «Previously there were accidents, zero risk does not exist, but not so many. Figures? They do not know exactly. Among other things because when there was only material damage, they did not transcend », specifies a military source.
MAINTENANCE
There are not one or two soldiers of the Air Force (EA) who, under the strict condition that their names remain outside the controversy, argue that behind the fatal accidents is a poor maintenance of the aircraft. And not only the culopollo, as they call the C-101 because of their resemblance to the back of the bird. The accident rate of the F-5 planes, in which the top guns of the Air complete their training in the last year, is also high: there are 24 dead pilots and 28 aircraft destroyed, "almost half (of the F-5 of Talavera the Real) has crashed. " It says a veteran, pilot master, who knows well the bowels of the complex and secret world of some planes that began to fly in the 70s, which must be checked every 150 hours of flight, and whose engines need to be disassembled and inspected every 300 hours of operation . At 600 hours, the engine must be fully restarted and each of its parts inspected. "Can you imagine the money to be invested?" Reflects the same source. "The problem is not the initial amount of what a plane costs [that can reach around 300 million], but the ongoing expense of the mandatory maintenance that must be done to keep the planes in safety."
In a document , dated December 2012, to which Chronicle has had access, the General Staff of the Air already warned: «Since 2008 [beginning of the crisis] the budget allocation of the Air Force has been progressively and significantly reduced, in such a way that the air activity in 2012 [That year, in just six months, a C-101 and an F-5 crashed, with the result of three dead pilots and seriously injured student ensign] reached worrying levels (...). This reduction progressively increases the deficit in training of crews , as well as the maintenance and maintenance of weapons systems (airborne jargon aircraft) ».
Little has changed since 2012. Behind closed doors, on April 16 of last year, the Chief of the General Staff of the Defense warned before the Defense Commission of the Congress of Deputies: "Another consequence of budgetary restrictions has been the reduction of stocks of spare parts (...) ». According to him," will affect the maintenance of aircraft. "Actually it had been affecting for some time.
However, to the Chronicle question of whether the poor maintenance of the aircraft is behind the fall of military aircraft, the response of the Air Force (EA) is categorical: "No". He adds: "The Air Force aircraft are perfectly maintained. The causes of the accidents are being investigated by the Technical Commission for the Investigation of Military Aircraft Accidents (CITAAM). This commission is made up of experts from the Air Force (engineers, pilots, doctors, ...) and will issue a report with its conclusions when finished. " And he concludes: "As in all aircraft fleets, civil or military, accidents occur in the Air Force."
The clearest case of all - and also the most investigated by military justice - is that of the F-5 that crashed in Talavera la Real (Badajoz), in 2012. The plane that Sergio Santamaría survived by a miracle. The fall was due to the break "due to material fatigue" of the second turbine wheel of the left engine. That, and not another, was the "material cause of the air accident," according to the 274-page order, 1,601 footnotes and six years of investigations, conducted by the head of the territorial military togado court 12 of Madrid, the commander Patricia Moncada In it, the chain of alleged negligence that led to the death of the commander instructor Ángel Álvarez Raigada was destroyed and left the body destroyed for life - with a high degree of physical disability that led to his retirement - to Ensign student Sergio Santamaría de Felipe, the only survivor of the nine air accidents that have hit the EA since April 2012.
Three years before the accident , as has been proven , the left engine wheel of the aircraft was already damaged. It had a crack that grew larger over time. And that break - caused by a phenomenon of "material fatigue" - would prove fatal. "A crack in a critical area that the manufacturer [General Electric Aviation] established special attention in its Technical Maintenance Orders", specifies the car, since "as the engine continued to run, [the crack] was spreading until the November 2, 2012 reached a length that caused the wheel to break (..) ".
THE BROKEN PIECE, IN THE AIR
However, the Commission for the Technical Investigation of Military Aircraft Accidents (CITAAM) did not seem to be concerned , according to Judge Moncada's investigation: "He had not followed the recommendation urged by the INTA (National Institute of Aerospace Technology , in order to contact the manufacturer of the disc, to consult certain findings found in the analyzes made "to the fragment of the broken piece. Did the EA skip the maintenance orders ?
The conclusion of the car is devastating: "If that wheel had been discarded, which was required by the technical maintenance orders, the initial cause of the air accident would have been avoided."
"That boy [Sergio] will have what happened to mine, which was flying in a helicopter with defective parts, fell into the sea and my son died." It goes for six years and Sebastián Ruiz is not taken from his head. «I swore that the rest of my days I would dedicate to know the truth» about that Super Puma rescue of the Air Force in which Lieutenant Sebastián Ruiz Galván, Sebas, 26, lost his life after crashing the aircraft near Fuerteventura , in March 2014.
«The rear of the device, where the tail rotor and other relevant evidence of what happened, are still at the bottom of the sea, because CITAAM does not consider it necessary to recover it. They are going to file the case ». That is why, repeated this courageous father from Chiclana, a training lawyer and official, "no matter how many obstacles they put in, I will continue investigating." In the maintenance parts, in the orders ... "The boys are flying with scrap metal," he told Chronicle. «And now something very similar will be happening with the airplanes. Not with everyone, of course, but it smells bad, the investigations are covered or they are half done. They had to explain to all Spaniards what is happening ».
The bleeding of fatal accidents has not stopped from the year of the tragedy of Talavera la Real (2012) until last September 18 (nine accidents and 16 deaths in eight years). An increase of 50% over the previous eight years, despite the fact that the activity fell by 25%.
The then twenty-year-old Sergio Santamaría immediately knew that his pilot days were over. For him, after leaving the hospital, a new way of life began, no matter how much to his short military career an ascent (to honorary lieutenant) would be added as a climax and he would be delivered by the hand of the very king of Spain. «It has been a hard time since the accident here. I'm going to need a lot of mental mentality ”, were his words after receiving, on July 4, 2013, the Aeronautical Merit Cross with a yellow badge - the decoration of the widows, say the pilots, for being reserved for those who die in the act of service or stay with serious injuries.
The image of that day reminded of the movie Born on the Fourth of July. Sergio was not Ron Kovic, the deranged soldier played by Tom Cruise, who doctors tell him will remain in a wheelchair forever. Our hero got up as he could from his wheelchair and, without looking at anyone with a gesture of asking for help, not even his father, also a pilot, dressed in the blue Air uniform and leaning on a crutch, walked alone and with the Head 30 meters apart from the Minister of Defense. He will no longer be able to fly, his great passion, but with 30 years, a career and a decoration reserved only for the best, Sergio Santamaría has been able to get up as only the brave ones do.
The big prize for so much determination is actually the degree as an aeronautical engineer that you are about to get. He won't be able to fly but he can design the planes of his dreams ... And wait. It is pending that the Justice is definitively pronounced on what happened that fateful morning within the F-5 that changed his life at 23 years. Never has a military investigation gone so far. Other claims - with or without deaths - have never ended in responsibilities. In a year or a year and a half there could be a trial.
The military judge points to eight commanders of the Air Force two colonels, a lieutenant colonel, three commanders, a captain and a lieutenant) as presumed responsible. It will be the central courts, competent to prosecute military officers of equal or superior rank to commander, who say the last word after six years of investigations and an instruction that has even needed the partial declassification of secret documents.
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