Mississippi jury acquits engineer accused of lying about 2017 military plane crash

GREENVILLE, Miss. (AP) — A jury has acquitted a former engineer overseeing military aircraft maintenance of charges of making false statements and obstructing justice during the criminal investigation of a 2017 military plane crash in Mississippi that killed all 16 service members aboard.

James Michael Fisher was found not guilty Thursday after an eight-day trial in federal court in Greenville, Mississippi.

Fisher had been the lead propulsion engineer at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex in Warner Robins, Georgia, in 2011. That’s when military investigators said civilian maintenance personnel failed to find defects in a cracked and corroded propeller blade that was installed on a KC-130T transport plane. Investigators said that propeller blade broke apart while the New York-based plane was in flight from Cherry Point, North Carolina to El Centro, California on July 10, 2017.

Fifteen Marines and one Navy corpsman were killed when the propeller blade slammed into the aircraft body, causing a shock that broke the plane into pieces in the sky and sent the wreckage plummeting into soybean fields near Itta Bena, Mississippi.

A federal grand jury in Mississippi indicted Fisher in 2024, who by then had retired. The indictment accused Fisher of lying to federal agents about changes to inspection procedures during a 2021 investigation, suggesting he was part of a cover-up that shifted blame to maintenance technicians.

But Steve Farese, Fisher’s defense lawyer, said someone else cleared technicians to change how propellers were inspected while Fisher was in Brazil, and thus he didn’t lie when he told investigators no documents allowing maintenance changes had been signed in 2011. Farese also said the propeller in question was worked on days before the form was signed, arguing the document allowing the change played no role in the crash.

“Nobody did it intentionally,” Farese told The Associated Press in a phone interview Monday. “As one witness said, there were 10 different ways for that blade to have through inspection and be missed or put back in the system accidentally. There were 10 different ways it could have happened. So there was no clarity in the trial as to exactly what did happen.”

Prosecutors didn’t immediately respond to a request seeking comment Monday. The indictment alleged that engineers at the Georgia base approved about 30 changes to propeller inspection procedures from 2008 to 2017, despite Fisher earlier not producing documents, and that investigators concluded “they could no longer trust Fisher.”

The plane was based at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York, and it was taking Marine special operations forces from North Carolina to Arizona for training. The crash was the deadliest Marine Corps air disaster since 2005, when a transport helicopter went down during a sandstorm in Iraq, killing 30 Marines and a sailor.

In the 2017 crash, six of the Marines and the sailor were from an elite Marine Raider battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and were headed for pre-deployment training in Yuma, Arizona, the Marine Corps said Tuesday. The remaining nine Marines had been based in New York,

The 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 dedicate a memorial to Yanky 72, the plane’s call sign.

After the crash, the Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force grounded some or all of their C-130s for a time, including examining and replacing propeller blades.