WASHINGTON – President Bush ranked in the middle of his Air National Guard flight class and flew 336 hours in a fighter jet before letting his pilot status lapse and missing a key readiness drill in 1972, according to his flight records belatedly uncovered Tuesday under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Pentagon and Bush’s campaign have claimed for months that all records detailing his Vietnam-era fighter pilot career have been made public, but defense officials said they found two dozen new records detailing his training and flight logs after The Associated Press filed a lawsuit and submitted new requests under the public records law.
“The Department of Defense regrets this oversight during the previous search efforts,” the Pentagon said in a letter to the Associated Press.
The newly released records show Bush, a lieutenant in the Texas Air National Guard, ranked No. 22 in a class of 53 pilots when he finished his flight training at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia in 1969.
Over the next three years, he logged 326.4 hours as a pilot and an additional 9.9 hours as a co-pilot, mostly in his the F-102A jet used to intercept enemy aircraft. Of the 278 hours he flew in the interceptor, about 77 hours were in the TF-102A, the two-seat trainer version of the one-seat fighter jet.
The records show his last flight was in April 1972, which is consistent with pay records indicating Bush had a large lapse of duty between April and October of that year. Bush has said he went to Alabama in 1972 to work on an unsuccessful Republican Senate campaign. Bush skipped a required medical exam that cost him his pilot’s status in August of that year.
Bush’s lone service in October was outside Texas, presumably with an Alabama unit he had permission to train with in September, October and November 1972.
The records also show Bush made a grade of 88 on total airmanship and a perfect 100 for flying without navigational instruments. Other scores ranged from 89 in flight planning to 98 in aviation physiology.
The newly released records do not include any from five categories of documents Bush’s commanders had been required to keep in response to the gaps in Bush’s training in 1972 and 1973.
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