John McCain regarded as cavalier air force pilot

Seattle News.Net
Monday 6th October, 2008

Though Republican presidential candidate John McCain has used his war hero status to push his political ambitions, fresh evidence has surfaced that the ex-navy pilot was actually accident prone.

Senator McCain was actually involved in three major crashes during his time as a pilot, and his attempt to project them as being due to engine failure are now coming unstuck.

In 1960, McCain was training in his AD-6 Skyraider on an overcast Texas morning when he slammed into Corpus Christi Bay and sheared the skin off his plane's wings.

Recounting the accident decades later in his autobiography, he wrote that it was due to engine failure, but according to a Los Angeles Times report, an investigation board at the Naval Aviation Safety Center found no evidence of engine failure.

The investigation board ruled then that the 23-year-old junior lieutenant wasn't paying attention and erred in using "a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn."

That crash was one of three in McCain's aviation career in which his flying skills and judgment were faulted or questioned by Navy officials.

In his most serious lapse, McCain was "clowning" around in a Skyraider over southern Spain about December 1961 and flew into electrical wires, causing a blackout.

In another incident, in 1965, McCain crashed a trainer jet in Virginia.

After McCain was sent to Vietnam, his plane was destroyed in an explosion on the deck of an aircraft carrier in 1967.

Three months later, he was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi and taken prisoner.

He was not faulted in either of those cases and was later lauded for his heroism as a prisoner of war.

The L.A. Times interviewed men who served with McCain and located once-confidential 1960s-era accident reports and formerly classified evaluations of his squadrons during the Vietnam War.

An examination of his record reveals a pilot who early in his career was cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits.

The Times asked McCain's campaign to release any military personnel records in the candidate's possession showing how the Navy handled the three incidents.

The campaign said it would have no comment.

Navy veterans who flew with McCain called him a good pilot.

He was described by some of his ex-Air Force colleagues as undisciplined and fearless; a characterization McCain himself has fostered in his autobiography.

But McCain's commanders sarcastically dubbed him "Ace McCain" because of his string of pre-Vietnam accidents.

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