WAY, WAY OFF IN THE WILD BLUE YONDER

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At about 2 p.m. on June 24, 1994, a B-52 bomber took off from Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State to practice air-show maneuvers. Barely 15 minutes later, while attempting to circle the runway's control tower in a steep turn, it crashed at 170 m.p.h., narrowly missing nuclear weapons bunkers and a crowded airmen's school. No one had wanted to fly with the pilot-Lieut. Colonel Arthur Holland, a 24-year veteran about to retire. Indeed, two of the three other officers killed with Holland were there because their subordinates feared flying with him.

Holland had a reputation as a "hot stick." He once climbed so steeply that fuel flowed out of the vent holes on top of the B-52's wing tanks. His hard flying in one air show popped 500 rivets during a prohibited climb, and he put his B-52 into a "death spiral" over one of his daughter's high school softball games. One copilot complained he had to wrestle control from Holland, who cleared a ridgeline by three feet during a run three months before his final flight. Most ominously, junior crewmembers said Holland had often talked about "rolling" a B-52 in flight -- something that has never been done. Yet Holland's superiors put him in charge of evaluating all B-52 pilots at the base. And while 13 commanders allowed him to keep flying, only one -- on assignment for barely a year and never warned by his predecessors of Holland's reputation -- was court-martialed over the crash. (He pleaded guilty last week.)

The Holland case is only one in a catalog of little-known but horrific disasters detailed in a confidential report by Alan Diehl, the Air Force's former top civilian safety official. The litany -- obtained by TIME last week -- includes 30 cases of mangled military probes and cover-ups by "incompetents, charlatans and sycophants." Diehl charges that Air Force crash probes are routinely sabotaged by officers seeking to please superiors, hide culpability and avoid embarrassment. Accidents like Holland's, says Diehl, "suggest the all too familiar pattern of ignoring dangerous behavior of certain individuals, especially when they are well liked, regarded as good flyers or hold high rank." His report to Defense Secretary William Perry, Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall and the congressional armed services panels makes clear that the problem is widespread. "These cases," he told them, "are just the tip of the iceberg."

The Diehl report says that "the U.S.A.F. major-mishap rate has increased by over 30% while the Navy and Army rates have decreased by 40% and 50%" over the past three years, not counting the five accidents that have killed 16 since April 17, including one last Friday. And there are potential civilian consequences. Last fall, Diehl reports, a pair of B-52s "narrowly missed colliding" with an airliner, an incident apparently "hushed up." Diehl writes, "This business, which has always been dangerous, has become unnecessarily deadly."