Three airforce members appear in court after drownings in Burundi

Three members of the airforce, including a helicopter commander and a flight engineer, appeared on charges of culpable homicide yesterday in a military court in Thaba Tshwane.

Their appearance is a result of an incident in 2002 when four Army soldiers drowned during a helicopter water excerise.

Maj. Frederick "Skippie" Scheepers, the Oryx commander, and Flight Sargeant Ryan de Beer, the flight engineer on board the helicopter, as as Maj. Kenneth Petso, commander of the Mobile Air Operations Team, stand accoused of the main charge of culpable homicide, alternatively the refusal to obay an official instruction and the non-execution of unit orders.

A fourth former member who was the instructor in charge of the soldiers on the day in question, Flight Sergeant Johann Edwin Buck, is no longer in the airforce. He is in the United Arab Emirates.

He will probably not be charged as he resigned more than three months ago.

The investigation against the men will begin on 30 August and will probably appearagain on November, Lt. Col. cor Nel Jansen van Vuuren, senior prosecutor, said yesterday.

Scheepers and De Beer are from Durban, while Petso works in Airforce Headquarters in Pretoria. The men where not asked to plead. all three answered that they were only aware of the main charge against them.

As far as is known, this is the first time since 1993 that an airforce accident has been followed by legal action.

Previously, two employees of the Atlas group, who was responsible for the maintenance of airforce aircraft, were found guilty of culpable homicide following an aircraft accident.

Beeld

6 April 2005: Update

I have received correspondence from Jill Heward who has commented as follows:

''Firstly, they did not jump out of the aircraft with their backpacks on, they didn't even have shoes on.

Secondly, the members were supposed to be trained parabats as well as VIP protectors. They had never done the water jump phase during their training, of which there is a minimum requirement of jumps. The four members who drowned were flagged and yellow on their CHAR assessment which means that they are not deployable internationally. They were also known risk takers and labeled as such.

The members could have not followed SOP's because there are no SOP's written for inland hoisting exercises. The only SOP's are for hoisting off a ship in the ocean, flying conditions which are vastly different from inland flying conditions. There is also nothing to that effect in the General Warfare Manual.

What the General Warfare manual does state is that the pilot and crew are responsible for the safety of the aircraft and crew while they are inside the aircraft.

The aircraft had no floatation gear on it which means that SAAFHQ and JOPS clearly had not done their planning as central Africa has some of the largest lakes in the world.

There were lifeboats available but they were unserviceable. The navy rescue diver as being utilized in some arbitrary admin job on the deployment. If the members had jumped out of the aircraft with life jackets on, they would have stood a good chance of breaking their necks from the force of hitting the water. During a re-enactment of the incident, the qualified diver also refused to put the lifejacket on due to fear of injury. If the members had been trained as they said they were, they would have been familiar with the signals used for the "all's well" and "I am in trouble". This did not happen.

Lastly, and most definitely my favourite is the use of your technical terminology. I am sure that you are referring to the blades and not the vanes. Although, the oryx helicopter has a downdraft of about 8 tons, this was clearly not enough to push the members under water. During the above mentioned re enactment, a police diver stayed in the water for over 15 minutes patiently treading water, waiting for the downdraft to push him under.

When the flight engineer jumped into the water, he was nearly dragged down by a drowning member.''

''The only real and competent defence these have is the use of private attorneys, at their own cost, of course. The military lawyers assigned to the case are junior officers, who are in the process of resigning and have recently withdrawn themselves from the case in the meantime. This is truly a professional organization to be proud of, isn't it? These individuals have been victimized by their home units, being threatened about losing their flying pay, being transferred and one of them has actually been forced to fly despite the personal and financial stress that he is under, constituting a very serious flight safety risk to himself and his crew.''

''One of the questions asked by the board was, and I quote 'Are you aware that all the members who drowned were black?'''