THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 13, 1995 TAG: 9501130501
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Short : 44 lines
The Navy tried Thursday to pull itself out of a public relations tailspin over questions about the safety of the warplane, it has pinned its future on, the F/A-18 Hornet.
Risks posed by problems with F/A-18 gearboxes manufactured by Lucas Western can and are being managed, said Cmdr. Stephen Pietropaoli, a Navy spokesman. In thousands of flights over the last five years, the gearboxes have failed only 96 times, he said, and not a single pilot has been killed or injured in those incidents.
The F/A-18's overall accident rate of 4.07 per 100,000 hours of service makes it the Navy's safest tactical aircraft, Pietropaoli added.
Lucas Western, a California-based subsidiary of a British company, agreed this week to pay an $18.5 million criminal fine for falsifying inspection reports on the gearboxes, which provide electrical power and drive hydraulic and fuel pumps. The firm is the only manufacturer of the component.
The fine is a record for such cases, and the Justice Department reportedly is considering civil suits seeking as much as $100 million. The Navy also may bar Lucas from additional contracting, Pietropaoli said.
The company claimed it made inspections it never made. But Lucas officials said last week that the gearboxes it manufactured still meet all required safety standards.
A failure of the gearbox can trigger an engine fire. Pietropaoli said F/A-18 pilots have been alerted to the problem and instructed to shut down an offending engine at the first sign of trouble. The single-seat twin-engine jet can be flown and landed safely on one engine, he said.
``The operational commanders of these aircraft understand this,'' Pietropaoli said.
As a precaution, the Navy is inspecting the gearboxes every 200 hours and replacing them about halfway through their normal life expectancy of 3,000 hours. The Navy also has assumed oversight for the gearbox-manufacturing contract; it had delegated that role to the plane's prime contractor, McDonnell-Douglas. by CNB