This story is part of the portfolio that won the 2023 Society for Professional Journalists Dateline Award for beat reporting in a newsletter or trade publication.
An Air Force investigation of a fatal fighter jet crash in 2020 quietly discovered that key components of the pilot’s ejection seat may have been counterfeit, Air Force Times has learned.
First Lt. David Schmitz, an F-16 Fighting Falcon pilot at South Carolina’s Shaw Air Force Base, died June 30, 2020, when his ejection seat malfunctioned as he tried to escape from a failed nighttime landing. He was 32.
The Air Force’s official inquiry in the months following the accident found that electronics inside the seat were scratched, unevenly sanded and showed otherwise shoddy craftsmanship.
That raised red flags at the Air Force Research Laboratory, which called for a closer look to confirm whether the pieces were fraudulent, according to previously unreported slides provided to Air Force Times. It’s unclear whether that question was ever answered.
While the Air Force suspected parts of the seat were counterfeit, it buried the information in a nonpublic section of its accident investigation report.
Those details have come to light in a federal civil lawsuit filed by Schmitz’s widow, Valerie, who is suing three defense companies for negligence and misleading the Air Force about the safety of their products.
“What the military does is inherently dangerous to begin with,” plaintiff attorney Jim Brauchle said Tuesday. “If you’re going to be engaging in that kind of activity, you want to be doing it with equipment that’s going to work.”
The case in U.S. District Court in South Carolina targets F-16 manufacturer Lockheed Martin; Collins Aerospace, which builds the ACES II ejection seat installed on planes across the Air Force; and multiple business units of Teledyne Technologies, which makes the seat’s digital recovery sequencer.
A sequencer is supposed to execute the steps of the ejection process when triggered in an emergency. Teledyne’s product is used in ejection seats on the F-15, F-16, F-22 and F-117 fighter jets, the A-10 attack plane, and B-1 and B-2 bombers around the world, according to its website.
In Schmitz’s case, the ejection seat shot 130 feet into the air but failed to deploy its parachute. The airman hit the ground about seven seconds later while still strapped into his seat. He died on impact.
The public version of the Air Force’s official accident report, released in November 2020, blamed the mishap on how Schmitz mishandled his descent into Shaw, as well as his supervisor’s suggestion to try a tail hook landing instead of telling Schmitz to eject earlier.
Brauchle argues that glosses over the true cause of Schmitz’s death
“What ultimately killed him was the ejection seat failure,” he said. “It has only one job, and that’s to get the pilot out and to get out a [parachute].”
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The public accident report acknowledged that the sequencer malfunction contributed to Schmitz’s death, but did not offer further details.
According to Air Force Research Laboratory slides dated Aug. 3, 2020, however, the service suspected that several transistors and microchips inside the sequencer were fake. Valerie’s legal team obtained the slides through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Six transistors “had no conformal coating, were heavily gouged, had arcing scratch marks, were considered obsolete and were suspected of being counterfeit,” the complaint said. A capacitor that may have been damaged while it was handled was “partially dislodged.”
Suppliers Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix provided the potentially counterfeit transistors, memory chips and accelerometer chip, according to the Air Force slides.
The lab also found signs that Teledyne had destroyed evidence related to the case, the lawsuit said. Teledyne appeared to have replaced five microchips on the sequencer before sending it to the lab.
“Teledyne had removed the printed wiring board from the DRS housing and had mounted the [board] to a ‘test fixture,’” the lawsuit said. “Teledyne had cut the leads on Channel #2′s parallel flash memory chip to facilitate chip removal.”
