Mississippi jury acquits engineer accused of lying about 2017 military plane crash
GREENVILLE, Miss. (AP) — A jury acquitted a former engineer who oversaw military aircraft maintenance on charges of making false statements and obstruction of justice during a 2017 criminal investigation. military plane crash Incident in Mississippi that killed all 16 soldiers on board.
James Michael Fisher was found not guilty Thursday after an eight-day trial in federal court in Greenville, Mississippi.
In 2011, Fisher was chief propulsion engineer at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex in Warner Robins, Georgia. Meanwhile, military inspectors said civilian maintenance personnel found no defects in the cracked and corroded propeller blade installed on the KC-130T transport plane. Investigators said that on July 10, 2017, the New York-based plane’s propeller blade disintegrated while flying from Cherry Point, North Carolina, to El Centro, California.
Fifteen Marines and one Navy medic He was killed when the propeller blade struck the plane’s fuselage, causing a shock that ripped the plane apart in the sky and caused the debris to crash into soybean fields near Itta Bena, Mississippi.
A federal grand jury in Mississippi indicted Fisher, who was retired by then, in 2024. The indictment accused Fisher of lying to federal agents about changes made to inspection procedures during the 2021 investigation and suggested he was part of a cover-up that shifted blame to maintenance technicians.
But Fisher’s defense attorney, Steve Farese, said someone else gave permission for technicians to change the way the propellers were inspected while Fisher was in Brazil, so he was not lying when he told investigators no documents were signed in 2011 authorizing maintenance changes. Farese also said the propeller in question had been working in the days before the form was signed, and argued that the document authorizing the change played no role in the accident.
“Nobody did this on purpose,” Farese told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Monday. “As one witness said, there were 10 different ways the knife could have passed inspection and gone unnoticed or accidentally gotten back into the system. There were 10 different ways this could have happened. So there was no clarity at trial as to exactly what happened.”
Prosecutors did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment Monday. The indictment alleged that engineers at the Georgia base approved nearly 30 changes to propeller inspection procedures from 2008 to 2017, even though Fisher had not previously submitted documentation, and inspectors concluded they “could no longer trust Fisher.”
The aircraft was based at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York, and was transporting Marine special forces forces from North Carolina to Arizona for training. The crash was the Marine Corps’ deadliest air disaster since 2005, when a transport helicopter crashed during a sandstorm in Iraq, killing 30 Marines and one sailor.
The six sailors and sailors in the 2017 crash were from an elite Marine Raider battalion at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and were attending pre-deployment training in Yuma, Arizona, the Marine Corps said Tuesday. The remaining nine sailors were in New York.
Debris spread across two to three miles (three to five kilometers) of farmland near the Mississippi Delta town of Itta Bena, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) north of the state capital of Jackson. Families gathered near the site a year later to erect a monument commemorating Yanky 72, the plane’s call sign.
After the crash, the Marines, Navy, and Air Force grounded some or all of the C-130s for a period of time, including inspection and replacement of the propeller blades.
