Hundreds of the Air Force's workhorse aircraft are being grounded as the service investigates a faulty part which, if not fixed, could potentially cause part of a plane's tail to fall off leading to a crash.
Faulty tail pins — which were allegedly made of the wrong material and are undersized — are suspected to have been put on hundreds of aircraft sometime between June 2020 and December 2022, according to a screenshot of a memo posted Feb. 9 to the unofficial Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page, a social media page where airmen often share information about their duty stations.
The memo says “should one pin fail, the other would not be able to carry the remaining load and the vertical stabilizer would depart the aircraft.”
Read Next: Mississippi Lawmakers Want to Keep Aging T-1A Training Jet in Service
Brian Brackens, a spokesman for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, confirmed to Military.com on Thursday that the memo featured in the Facebook screenshot is authentic.
Air Force Materiel Command, which does logistics support for the service, said in a press release Wednesday that flight operations were being stopped for KC-135 Stratotanker refueling planes, RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance planes and WC-135 Constant Phoenix radiation detecting jets as it investigates their tail pins. The stand-down encompasses more than 400 aircraft in total, according to service fact sheets about the planes.
“We're taking…
