RENO — The three men in the air tanker crew didn't complain to their bosses because it's not what you do if you want to keep flying.
But like others before them, the three who died in a crash while fighting a fire in the Sierra last summer knew the half-century-old aircraft they were flying wasn't entirely safe.
They had friends who died in previous air-tanker crashes while flying under contract for the Forest Service .
And at least one of them, pilot Steven Wass, repeatedly had told colleagues, friends and family of his concerns about the structural integrity of the aging C-130A airplanes, especially the wings, according to a new 831-page Forest Service accident report.
Wass, 42, of Gardnerville, Nev., routinely kept on board with him a copy of an accident report on a triple fatal crash of a plane just like the one he was flying -- a plane that had rolled off the Lockheed production line in 1957 just two serial numbers after his.
That plane crashed in Southern California in 1994 after the wings fell off -- just like his.
"Steve Wass was very aware of the weak structure of the C-130s," according to one of more than 40 witnesses interviewed by Forest Service special agents after the crash last summer near Walker, Calif.
Witnesses' names were edited from a copy of the preliminary accident investigation report that the agency provided the Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act request.
One witness indicated that he and Wass "had researched the C-130s and concluded that the A and B models had weak wing structures," special agent Debra Mathews wrote.
Wing Problems
Another witness who knew Wass for more than 20 years said the pilot had "raised pointed questions and concerns about the aircraft, being old with wing problems."
Wass told him that "the airplane was older than he or I, that the military got rid of them for a reason," the witness told Mathews.
The witness "stated that he did not want to see any more of his friends go down."
Co-pilot Craig LaBare, 36, of Loomis, Calif., and flight engineer Mike Davis, 59, of Bakersfield, were also killed in the June 17 crash while dropping retardant in the Sierra about 70 miles south of Reno.
A Reno television crew caught the moment on videotape when the plane's wings broke off and the tanker crashed in a fiery explosion.
LaBare's widow, Laurie, said her husband had talked of maintenance problems with the plane.
