We blew it--and so did the Army

A story we published on Nov. 15 about the Army’s investigation into a fatal helicopter crash in Germany earlier this year has caused considerable anguish to the families of the three deceased crewmembers and angered Army public affairs officials as well, all of which is on full display in the comment thread attached to the story. So it’s worth taking a closer look.

Fundamentally, the story, by Stars and Stripes reporter Mark Patton, is a straightforward account of the results of the Army’s investigation into the crash. The story noted that investigators discovered several procedural anomalies associated with the Black Hawk helicopter training flight, but that ultimately no cause for the fatal crash could be determined.

Family members of the crew were particularly stung by these elements of the story:

• The implication that overloaded fuel tanks could have been a contributing cause of the crash
• The statement that Army officials “would not discuss the results of the toxicology report or comment whether drugs or alcohol were a factor in the accident”
• An incorrect rank given for Gary M. Farwell, the pilot in command of the mission

Additionally, public affairs officers with US Army Europe contend that Stars and Stripes declined their offer to interview a Subject Matter Expert about the accident report.

I have investigated the reporting of this story and the complaints of the family members and the Army, and I have come to the conclusion that both Stars and Stripes and Army public affairs officials committed errors, the combined effect of which was to unfairly besmirch the professional reputations of the three crewmembers who died aboard the helicopter.

First, our mistake.

The story did indeed imply that overloaded fuel tanks could have had something to do with the crash. Several paragraphs were devoted to explaining the risks of carrying too much fuel and raising questions whether the amount of fuel the pilots chose to load was “excessive.”

What we failed to include in the story was that an accident investigator explicitly ruled out the excess fuel as a factor in the accident. The investigator wrote: “I cannot identify that the excess fuel caused or contributed to the incident.” Therefore, we never should have belabored the issue of the excess fuel. We are publishing a clarification to remedy this mistake in Friday’s print editions, as well as on the web version of the story.

Now, the Army’s mistakes.

1. Army public affairs officers delayed releasing the accident investigation report to Stars and Stripes for more than six months, an omission for which they have apologized. When they did finally release it, they redacted from the report the results of the toxicology tests on the crewmembers.

After the story was published, we were informed that those results turned out to be negative, but we had no way of knowing that at the time we prepared the story, since the Army refused to comment on the results.

So, we simply reported what we knew, which was that officials would not disclose the results. The family members are correct to feel that such a statement in the story left open the possibility that drugs or alcohol might have been involved in the crash, but their complaint should be with the Army for withholding this exculpatory information from Stars and Stripes.

2. We did indeed get Farwell’s rank wrong; he was posthumously promoted to Chief Warrant Officer 4. But that was because the Army supplied us with incorrect information at the time we wrote the story.

3. We also mistakenly wrote in the story that no Army helicopters in Europe are equipped with flight data recorders. In fact, USAREUR officials now say that it is only Black Hawk helicopters that do not have flight data recorders. Again, our mistake was based on incorrect information initially supplied by Army public affairs officers.

4. Finally, the assertion by Army Col. Bryan Hilferty, chief of USAREUR public affairs, that “we did offer Stars and Stripes the opportunity to speak to a Subject Matter Expert--they declined that offer” is misleading.

Stars and Stripes reporters and editors made repeated requests to interview the lead accident investigator in the case, but Hilferty’s office rebuffed those requests and actually redacted the investigator’s name from the report so that we could not identify him/her.

Instead, we were offered the opportunity to interview “somebody who knows Black Hawks.” After waiting nearly two weeks for such an interview to be arranged without success, we opted to ignore the Army’s stonewalling and sought out an expert of our own and then published the story.

There are lessons in this episode for everyone concerned. For our part, we must be more diligent in fully and accurately reporting the results of an investigation and we must never intentionally omit a fact because it might not fit a particular theory.

And Army public affairs officials should be more accurate in the facts they provide to us, less secretive in redacting the reports that they release and more cooperative in furnishing essential sources for interviews. Had they done those things, we could have avoided the unfortunate mistakes in this story.

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