From AF Times:

By all accounts, Adam Lucero was a hard-charging airman. When he didn’t make it into a summer camp for the Air Force Academy, he enlisted at age 17 through the Delayed Entry Program and had his staff sergeant rocker by the time he was 21.

But Lucero, now 24, dreamed of going to Officer Training School and earning his pilot wings, so he poured himself into his work and studies, hoping he could one day fly the fighter jets he maintained at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska.

That same passion, drive and singleness of purpose may have led to his downfall. When he discovered what he considered to be unsafe maintenance practices by his squadron co-workers, and was unable to get the support he sought from his superiors, he started going directly to pilots to tell them the planes they were flying were unsafe. For 18 months, he pushed his complaints despite his leaders’ opposition. Finally, in July 2006, he was forced out of the Air Force.

The 11th Air Force Inspector General’s Office and Defense Department IG have concluded Lucero’s commanders engaged in reprisals against him. What remains unclear is whether another, ongoing investigation will clear his name and let him rejoin the service.

In the meantime, he’s selling trucks in Fairbanks.

Lucero’s troubles began in January 2005 when he transferred to Eielson’s 355th Aircraft Maintenance Unit to become an A-10 crew chief. There he met Staff Sgt. Dusty Surber, a fellow enlisted airman with designs on becoming a pilot. The 354th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, the 355th’s parent unit, would seem to be the perfect place for two ambitious airmen: Winner of the 2004 Air Force Maintenance Effectiveness Award, the unit had earned all “outstanding” and “excellent” ratings in its most recent Pacific Air Forces inspections.

But in interviews with Air Force Times, Surber and Lucero said the drive for high sortie numbers there meant serious safety issues were overlooked to keep planes flying.

“I didn’t like what I saw — a lot of people were taking shortcuts, not following the [technical orders], letting aircraft fly that should [have been] grounded until they got repaired,” Lucero said.

He said he once had an airman first class suggest to him that they replace a lost screw with epoxy.

With such high expectations for producing sortie numbers, Surber said, maintenance holdups were unwelcome.

“If you wrote up something you thought was bad, they thought ... ‘You’re just doing this to try and screw us,’” Surber said. “These are training missions we’re flying here, you know? What’s the point of risking someone’s life over a training mission? “Everybody was gunning for that next stripe or ... that next rank,” Surber said. “Whenever you start affecting ... those numbers and those sorties ... you’re really messing with fire, because that’s somebody’s potential promotion.”

Disillusioned, Surber asked to be transferred to the base maintenance operations control center. At first, he said, his request was denied because the 355th didn’t want to lose a 7-level crew chief; but after he started talking to the squadron’s pilots about how unsafe he thought their aircraft were, “I was gone within a week,” he said.

Surber had a parting message for his friend Lucero, which he recalled for Air Force Times: “If you stick to your guns, and you’re not a ‘yes’ man, I guarantee you’re gonna find a whole world of trouble.” Lucero found it.

According to the report of a Defense Department-directed investigation into Lucero’s removal from the Air Force, Lucero identified a migrated wedding band — a bearing that fits around a steering pin — on an A-10 he was inspecting June 9, 2005. While that bearing was not specifically on his inspection checklist, he recognized the problem because of his previous work in the Aero Repair shop, and wrote it up as a Red X — the most serious indicator of a maintenance issue. A Red X grounds a plane.

The proper procedure, Lucero knew, was to remove the part and fix it — time-consuming, but it was in “black and white” on the technical order, Lucero said. When a specialist arrived, however, he climbed “on top of the jet, without a TO or anything, took a pry bar and popped it back into place,” Lucero said. The specialist then overwrote the Red X, clearing the plane to fly.

Lucero informed several flight-line supervisors of the incident, but each time was rebuffed. The specialist, his superiors told him, knew better than he how to handle the problem, and Lucero should trust the specialist’s judgment.

Dismayed, Lucero took his case up the chain — and for his troubles, he got harsh rater-directed feedback, a reprimand indicating the need for specific performance improvement. “Our section will not tolerate you being irresponsible,” the feedback reads. Any problems outside his specialty must be put “on a dash [indicating a nongrounding maintenance issue] ... let that shop determine what the symbol needs to be.”

According to the investigation report and unbeknownst to Lucero, the specialist who had “fixed” the wedding band was punished with a letter of reprimand July 6 for his actions. Lucero didn’t find that out until Sept. 12 — after months of being told he should know better than to correct a specialist.

Lucero said he quickly became persona non grata within the squadron. His supervisor said it was Lucero’s brashness and lack of respect that rubbed leadership the wrong way.

“It’s not what he had found, it was the way he was going about doing his work,” said Tech. Sgt. Donald Wayne McKee, Lucero’s former direct supervisor and now retired. “When he would up-channel something, he wasn’t doing it like he was supposed to.”

When a crew chief finds a problem, he is supposed to notify an expeditor, who alerts an appropriate specialist for an evaluation, according to AFI 21-101, the authority on aircraft maintenance. McKee said Lucero would often alert the specialist himself, or just Red-X the plane based on his prior training.

Documents in the investigation report show several other base leaders counseled Lucero on his failure to use correct reporting methods.

“It was causing jets not to make their flights,” McKee said. “I kept counseling him on that, telling him, listen, you need to make sure that people know.”

The battle escalated quickly: Lucero kept taking his story of bad maintenance to higher powers, and his leadership countered with increasingly stern discipline.

On July 15, 2005, Lucero met with investigators at the 354th Fighter Wing’s IG office, complaining of bad maintenance and reprisals against him. Within a week, he was ordered to get a mental health evaluation, and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

Two further military evaluators gave Lucero the same diagnosis, one suggesting Lucero be kicked out of the service. A civilian psychologist later rejected the diagnosis.

Lucero’s paper trail kept growing. He had begun secretly using a voice recorder in conversations with his superiors, legal under federal and Alaska state law. But when McKee found out, he confiscated the recorder, leading to a heated confrontation with Lucero and squadron officers. Afterward, Lucero got a letter of reprimand for using the recorder and an Article 15 for disobeying direct orders not to use it. He was also taken off the flight line and assigned janitorial duties.

Lucero successfully rebutted the official reprimand and declined his Article 15. His squadron commander, Lt. Col. Rick Petito, brought court-martial charges but later dismissed them, instead issuing another letter of reprimand for the recorder.

Petito, who declined to comment for this report, later learned Lucero was telling pilots in the 354th Fighter Squadron their aircraft were not safe, the investigation report said. Petito slapped Lucero with no-contact orders, saying he could not speak with the pilots or the maintenance group commander.

Petito then gave Lucero a letter of admonishment on Sept. 23, 2005, officially for violating the no-contact order with the 354th Maintenance Group commander.

Then, on Oct. 11, 2005, McKee gave Lucero a referral enlisted performance report with the lowest possible rating. A referral EPR typically means an airman screwed up, is not likely to get promoted in the next cycle and could be forced out of the service. Lucero’s referral EPR included this statement: “You still find it necessary to try to undermined [sic] the moral [sic] of the section and the squadron.”

In August 2006, the 354th Fighter Wing’s Investigator General’s Office ruled against Lucero in his reprisal allegations. But Lucero took his complaint up the chain to the 11th Air Force IG, which told him that without new evidence, there were no grounds to investigate.

Lucero then wrote to Rep. Don Young, D-Alaska. The Defense Department-directed investigation report shows that when Young contacted the 354th Fighter Wing commander, Brig. Gen. David Scott, Young was told Lucero’s reprisal complaints had been determined to be unfounded, although Scott had never looked into any of the allegations himself. In late September, the 11th Air Force IG, which had earlier indicated there were no grounds to investigate, told Lucero it found all his allegations to be unsubstantiated. At that point, Lucero called the Defense Department complaint hotline. The Defense Department IG office ordered the 11th Air Force IG to start a new investigation. Scott appointed an independent officer from the base to lead the investigation: Lt. Col. Anthony Buck, the range director for the 353rd Combat Training Squadron.

Buck conducted about 20 interviews during his 10-month investigation, and said opinions about Lucero “ranged from one of the sharpest NCOs the person had ever seen to a conniving ... deceiving-type individual.” But the investigation consistently ran into roadblocks. The worst, he said, came from the one place designed to protect base airmen from injustice: the 354th Fighter Wing Inspector General’s Office.

“There was some bias within the IG office that I had to deal with, and that was less than professional from the IG office,” Buck said. The problem, he said, was that the 354th IG’s investigation into Lucero’s complaints had been done “poorly” by an airman who served in the IG office and the 354th Maintenance Group, and who had a distinct anti-Lucero bias.

Buck wasn’t amused. “I outranked the individual, and I basically laid down the law as far as what was acceptable to me,” he said. While none of those investigated admitted to reprisal actions, Buck said, “some of the individuals admitted that Staff Sergeant Lucero was absolutely correct in his accusations of faulty maintenance, and his bringing this stuff forward actually ended up helping the situation within the maintenance squadron.”

Still, Buck recalled that squadron commander “Petito was adamant about his belief that Sergeant Lucero went about bringing this up in the wrong way, in the wrong manner.“ That, Buck said Petito told him, was the real reason behind the letter of admonishment.

McKee stands behind his actions, saying he still agrees with the referral EPR he gave Lucero.

“I felt that he deserved what I wrote,” McKee told Air Force Times. McKee said he got a letter of counseling from squadron leadership for issuing the referral EPR. But he continues to think Buck’s investigation was unnecessary, as both the wing and 11th Air Force investigative offices found no wrongdoing.

Buck did not agree. In his final report, he labeled both the LOA and the referral EPR as reprisal actions. The Defense Department IG office agreed, and in a memo dated March 6, 2007, also agreed that the 11th Air Force IG office should conduct a second investigation into other possible reprisals uncovered during Buck’s investigation.

However, the report came too late for Lucero. In July 2006, Scott denied Lucero’s re-enlistment.

Scott is now serving as deputy commander of a NATO combined air operations center in Greece. Lucero has filed a complaint with the Defense Department IG office, alleging Scott wrongfully denied his re-enlistment. A spokeswoman for the 11th Air Force IG office refused to discuss specifics of the second, ongoing investigation, citing longstanding policy, but confirmed the investigation is now in the “writing phase.” Lucero says he’s been told it will be several more months before that report is released. Since his denied re-enlistment, Lucero has been selling trucks in Fairbanks, about 30 miles northwest of Eielson. He can’t get back into the Air Force unless the investigation clears his record, but he recently decided to enter the Alaska Army National Guard through Officer Candidate School and become a helicopter pilot.

“Once the Air Force finishes [the investigation], I’ll probably make a request to transfer over so that I can fly fighters, because that’s still my goal,” he said.

Buck is not satisfied that justice has been done.

“There has been no action taken,” Buck said, citing the larger, ongoing investigation as a possible reason further punishments have not been meted out.

“In my opinion, it’s not right that the individual has not been vindicated,” Buck said. “The individual that’s reprised against is supposed to be made whole, and that definitely has not happened yet. He’s selling cars downtown.”