Air Force officials are now requiring some maintainers to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to receive information about crashes and mishaps, a move that transparency advocates say is heavy-handed and hides important safety information from the public.
Starting in August, the Air Force chief of safety began pushing for maintainers to start receiving privileged safety training and regular safety briefings -- something that aircrew members had been doing for some time. But in order to receive that detailed information about crashes and mishaps, the maintenance professionals are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, a legal agreement that outlines keeping confidential information tight-lipped.
"A signed NDA is required to receive Safety Privilege Information, which includes mishap factors, findings, causes and recommendations," Ann Stefanek, a Department of the Air Force spokeswoman, told Military.com in an emailed statement. "Without privilege, we don't quickly get to the root cause of a mishap, and mishap prevention is critical to mission readiness and our national security."
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The NDAs, which Stefanek said are already required among some job fields to access the privileged information, are now required for the aircraft maintainers who do hands-on work with aircraft, including in the National Guard and reserve.
Stefanek also detailed that "no one can be required to sign the NDA, but those aviation maintainers would not be allowed access to any privileged safety information and would not be as fully equipped to help prevent mishaps and injuries."
Word about the NDAs first was revealed on the popular Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page, where troops talk about insider information. A screenshot, which Military.com verified as authentic and accurate with the Air Force, was of an email from Air Combat Command encouraging airmen to sign the NDA by Oct. 11.
The revelation about the new push to have maintainers sign NDAs comes as the Air Force faces major safety scrutiny. The service announced in February that "aircraft maintenance-related mishaps cost Air Education and Training Command more than $50 million" since 2018, and officials were assessing various measures on how to best prevent them.
It also comes as Military.com has reported that members of Congress, service members and military families have raised safety and transparency concerns regarding the Air Force's CV-22 Osprey program.
Military.com reviewed internal safety documents and revealed previous warning signs stretching back a decade were related to the same mechanical failure that caused an Air Force Osprey to crash off the coast of Japan late last year, killing eight airmen on board.
Stefanek claimed that looping in maintenance personnel into the privileged safety information, like other career fields, will allow them to better understand problems that happen, but requires their confidentiality.
"The confidentiality provided under Safety Privilege underpins the success of our mishap prevention program by allowing airmen and Guardians to provide a full accounting of mishap events without danger of disciplinary action or public release," Stefanek said. "The aircraft maintenance career field has never regularly received this type of training, and that's a gap in our hazard and mishap mitigation effort."
But the premise of having maintainers sign non-disclosure agreements is alarming, Dan Grazier, a senior fellow for the National Security Reform Program at the nonprofit Stimson Center think tank in Washington, D.C., told Military.com in an interview on Tuesday.
Grazier, who is also a former Marine Corps captain, said he understands that classified information should remain that way, but safety information about aircraft -- which is typically labeled Controlled Unclassified Information, meaning it is not secret but should be kept out of public view -- shouldn't be hidden behind NDAs.
"It's absolutely heavy-handed, and it's an effort to intimidate the people the services need to function properly," Grazier said. "I wore the uniform for a little more than 10 years, and I was never asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement."
Grazier added that this revelation about maintenance NDAs is "part of a pattern of excess secrecy" that is being seen at the Pentagon and other service branches.
Last year, first amendment watchdogs expressed concerns about the Air Force's Freedom of Information Act portal, which asks whether individuals agree to only "clearly releasable" information.
This summer, the Air Force refused to disclose a list of tough jobs that were eligible for bonuses, but Military.com reviewed the list and was able to disclose the unclassified information.
Grazier said that the new NDA requirement could put a potential legal burden on those airmen, and that not complying could harm their future in uniform.
"We saw this with the wide use of the controlled unclassified information stamp on seemingly every single document imaginable coming out of the Pentagon; we see it in the lack of responses on Freedom of Information Act requests; and now we're seeing it like this, where the services are generally threatening the careers of their personnel if they don't sign non-disclosure agreements," Grazier said.
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