Читать книгу Flight of the Forgotten - Mark A. Vance - Страница 19

When John called and told me that they had located the Ketchum crew’s accident report and that a copy of it was available to the next of kin, I was ecstatic. Big Joe had come through with a lot of historical information from the Air Force Historical Records Center at Maxwell Air Force Base and had been told that the accident report itself was available from Norton Air Force Base in California. It was as if the veil on a lifetime mystery was starting to lift and I can still remember my excitement as I submitted a written request for the report. I was so elated at the time that I wasn’t really listening when my friend also cautioned that Big Joe had been told quite unequivocally at Maxwell Air Force Base that we would never find out everything about this particular crash. He had been told that many before us had tried and failed even while doing official Air Force research. My uncle’s crash evidently had a number of information roadblocks that should not have been there for something supposedly routine from so long ago. At the time though, I wasn’t hearing any of it as I fired off my letter and eagerly awaited the report. I was confident that my childhood mystery would soon become an explained event that a professional pilot could easily understand.

It was more than just a surprise a short time later, when my request for a forty-three year old accident report resulted in a terse letter from the U.S. Air Force and a maze of at least thirty blacked out microfilm documents. The crash report, which I had assumed just finding would be the biggest challenge, contained numerous unreleasable portions and withheld data. The Air Force contended that they still had to protect the confidentiality of eyewitnesses to the crash. It was the beginning of a stonewalling process that would last the next three and a half years, at which time they finally admitted there were no eyewitnesses.

My follow-up request a short time later was much more direct and drew an even nastier response from the Air Force colonel in charge of the facility, ordering me to cease the investigation. I had signed my letter captain and it had been misinterpreted as meaning Air Force captain rather than airline captain. Hence, the colonel in charge of the facility ordered me to cease the inquiry immediately for the sake of my military career. He informed me that the unreleasable data in the report I was requesting was beyond my level of understanding and that he had personally reviewed the file and found nothing in it I needed. He went on to cite various exclusions to the Freedom of Information Act and again stressed the importance of protecting Air Force eyewitnesses. His letter went one step further though, employing the term “detrimental effect on our national security” to indicate his level of displeasure with my inquiry. He ended his letter by offering me the option to appeal his decision to the Secretary of the Air Force, no doubt assuming that an Air Force captain would never do so. That option was simply a ruse to make the process appear democratic, when in fact the Air Force had absolutely no intention of ever releasing the information.

The predictable response to my immediate appeal was a complete denial of everything I was requesting under various Air Force regulations and exclusions to the Freedom of Information Act. The Air Force Secretary’s letter cited a variety of civil court cases in which the Air Force had successfully defended itself against challenges of this sort leaving me convinced I was wasting my time. After several months of requests, denials, counter-requests and counter-denials leading up to this point I was summarily informed that this was the final Air Force action on the entire affair.