F-16 pilot’s widow sues AF over counterfeit ejection seat parts

1st LT David Schmitz

We talked about Lieutenant David Schmitz a while back when he tragically died in an F-16 accident. You’ll recall he crashed while on a nighttime aerial refueling training exercise (his first ever AR operation for some reason). As we discussed earlier, there was a cascade of failures, any one of which might have saved the young pilot’s life. This culminated in Schmitz ejecting, but the seat failed.

Now Schmitz’s widow is suing over the faulty components in his ejection seat. Air Force Times has some of the details;

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.

These aircraft are equipped with what’s called a zero-zero ejection seat. They are designed to ensure pilot survival from zero altitude and zero airspeed. Previous generations required some altitude to successfully deploy the chute. The ACES II should have been able to save Lieutenant Schmitz as long as his canopy was pointed up, regardless of altitude.

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Air Force