1994 Black Hawk Shootdown Incident - Air Force Accident Investigation

Air Force Accident Investigation

By 13:15 local time, Kurdish civilians notified the MCC that they had witnessed the two Black Hawks being shot down 40 miles (64 km) north of Arbil and that there were no survivors. The news was quickly picked-up by the media and broadcast by CNN.

Within hours, U.S. President Bill Clinton was briefed on the shootdown and called the heads of government of the United Kingdom and France, John Major and François Mitterrand, to express regret and sympathy for the deaths of their citizens in the incident. Clinton then appeared a few hours later in a televised news conference in which he stated that he had directed the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to lead an inquiry into the accident. Clinton further stated, "We will get the facts, and we will make them available to the American people and to the people of Britain, France, and Turkey, our partners in Operation Provide Comfort."

USAF General Robert C. Oaks, Commander of United States Air Forces in Europe, immediately appointed an Air Force Regulation (AFR) 110-14 accident investigation board composed of a board president, 11 board members from the USAF and U.S. Army, three associate members from France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, four legal advisers, and 13 technical advisers. The board president was USAF Major General James G. Andrus. An AFR 110-14 investigation's findings are publicly released and the testimony of witnesses in the investigation can be used against them in military disciplinary proceedings. For this reason, after serious mishaps the USAF usually also conducts a separate safety investigation, in which the results are not publicly released and witness testimony is immune from prosecution. In this case, however, for unknown reasons the USAF decided not to conduct a safety investigation.

After interviewing 137 witnesses and conducting numerous tests, the 27-volume, 3,630 page AFR 110-14 investigation report was publicly released on July 13, 1994, although some of the report's details had been leaked to the media by unknown defense officials two weeks earlier. The board made seven general findings about what they believed caused the shootdown to occur:

1. Wickson misidentified the Black Hawk helicopters and May failed to notify Wickson that he had been unable to confirm the identity of the helicopters.

2. The IFF transponders on the F-15s and/or the Black Hawks did not operate correctly for unknown reasons.

3. Misunderstandings existed throughout the OPC forces as to how coalition air operations procedures and responsibilities applied to MCC helicopter operations.

4. The AWACS crew commander, Lawrence Tracy, was not currently qualified in accordance with USAF regulations and he and the other AWACS crewmembers committed mistakes.

5. OPC personnel in general were not properly trained in the rules of engagement for the northern Iraq no fly zone.

6. The Black Hawks were not equipped with more modern radios which would have allowed them to communicate with the F-15s.

7. The shootdown "was caused by a chain of events which began with the breakdown of clear guidance from the Provide Comfort Combined Task Force to its component organizations."

The board report stated that, "There is no indication that the AWACS Senior Director (Wang), the Mission Crew Commander (Tracy) and/or the DUKE (Martin) made any radio calls throughout the intercept, or that they issued any guidance to either the AWACS crew or the F-15 pilots." Although the OPC ROE did task the AWACS with controlling and monitoring helicopter operations in the TAOR, the board found that the AWACS crew believed that they had no responsibility for controlling U.S. Army Black Hawks or ensuring that other coalition aircraft were aware of Black Hawks operating in the TAOR. When questioned by board investigators as to who was responsible for tracking the helicopters, Tracy said, "I cannot tell you that. I honestly don't know." When Wang was asked the same question by the investigators, he replied, "No one is responsible." When the investigators asked Martin what action he took when the F-15s called a visual identification on two Hind helicopters, Martin stated, "I did nothing."

The board found that combined OPC forces, led by Pilkington, Emery, Richardson, and other USAF officers, had failed to integrate helicopters into aircraft operations in the TAOR. An Eagle Flight officer later testified that he had been told by the CTF's chief of staff, a USAF officer, that the army Black Hawk unit was not considered to be part of OPC. Thus, the CTF staff, under the direction of USAF Colonel James Rusty O'Brien, had not tried to coordinate the U.S. Army Black Hawk missions into the daily ATOs. In fact, neither O'Brien nor his predecessors had established any type of procedure for communicating information on Black Hawk missions to the Combined Forces Air Component (CFAC). The MCC commander, Colonel Thompson, had personally called O'Brien on the night of April 13 to tell him about the next day's Black Hawk mission into northern Iraq, a mission that had been specifically and personally approved by Pilkington earlier that day. O'Brien or his staff apparently did not attempt to communicate specific information on this mission to the AWACS or F-15 fighter units at Incirlik, the CFAC, the ground-based mission director, or to the "Duke" on board the AWACS.

For reasons that USAF officers were unable to explain, two versions of each day's ATO were published, one for the USAF units at Incirlik, and another for the Eagle Flight unit at Pirinclik. The ATO version sent to Eagle Flight, for unknown reasons, gave a wrong IFF Mode I code for the TAOR. Although army Black Hawks had been operating for almost two years in the TAOR while squawking a wrong code and observed doing so by numerous AWACS crews, no one ever told them that they were using a wrong code. On the day of the shootdown, the F-15s had interrogated the Black Hawks on two different IFF Modes (Mode I and Mode IV). The first responded negatively because the Black Hawks were squawking the wrong code. The second mode responded negatively for technical reasons that the investigation was unable to conclusively determine.

The board did not investigate whether any USAF institutional factors, such as a lack of crew resource management training for the involved aircrews, might have been a factor. Also, the board did not attempt to determine if Wickson and May had violated any of the existing OPC rules of engagement as defined by the ATO or other written instructions.

The United States Secretary of Defense, William Perry, later summarized the "errors, omissions, and failures" contributing to the accident as, "The F-15 pilots misidentified the Black Hawks, the AWACS crew failed to intervene, Eagle Flight and their operations were not integrated into the Task Force, and the IFF systems failed." General Shalikashvili, now serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added that, "There were a shocking number of instances where people failed to do their job properly."