1994 Fairchild Air Force Base B-52 Crash - Aftermath

Aftermath

On May 19, 1995, Pellerin pleaded guilty at a USAF court-martial proceeding to two counts of dereliction of duty for his actions, or lack thereof, that contributed to the crash. He was sentenced to forfeit $1,500 of salary a month for five months and received a written reprimand. The USAF did not reveal whether any other officer involved in the chain of events leading to the crash received any type of administrative or disciplinary action. Critics of USAF's safety record stated that this crash was an example of a pattern of problems related to enforcement of safety procedures within USAF.

Although the accident investigation found that procedures and policies were supposedly already in place to prevent such a crash from occurring again, the fact that this crash occurred showed that in at least one instance the existing safety policies and their enforcement had been grievously inadequate. To re-emphasize the importance of adherence to existing safety policies and correcting the actions of anyone violating them at any time, the USAF quickly distributed the findings of the accident investigation throughout the service. These measures, however, failed to prevent – sixteen years later – the occurrence in almost identical circumstances of another accident, when a C-17 transport aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, on an aerial display practice flight.

Today, the Fairchild crash is used in both military and civilian aviation environments as a training aid in teaching crew resource management and to show the importance of enforcing safety regulations.