A relative of a crew member who survived a B-1B Lancer crash in South Dakota earlier this year said the official accident investigation report into the mishap wrongly criticized the airman’s weight and unfairly put blame on Ellsworth Air Force Base personnel.
Joni Smith, the mother-in-law of the instructor pilot of the aircraft, told Military.com she had submitted letters raising concerns about the incident to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, as well as members of the state’s delegation in Washington, D.C. One criticism was that Smith said the report inaccurately highlighted the airman’s alleged weight as being “nearly 260” pounds, which the report stated was over the 245-pound maximum, something the investigator said “further highlights the unit’s degradation of culture and discipline.”
Smith detailed in her letter and in an interview with Military.com that her son-in-law never officially weighed more than 245 pounds, was never disqualified from flying, and passed his last physical fitness test just six weeks before the crash. She said that his alleged weight mentioned in the report was taken in a hospital bed, which she called an inaccurate and unfair way to gather that data, especially as he was bandaged up and swollen from the crash.
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