Then she embarked on a legal battle with the F-16's manufacturer, defense contractor General Dynamics. Harduvel obtained a copy of the accident report and did the research that convinced her the jet was faulty ("I had to _ I couldn't sleep at night," she says of her efforts to piece together what happened to her husband).
(More than 40 pilots have died in F-16 training accidents.) She recalls her initial frustration at trying to figure out how Ted, one of the first pilots chosen to fly the sleek F-16s at MacDill, could have crashed seven minutes after takeoff. The Air Force blamed the accident on "pilot error." Case closed.īut Harduvel thought something had to be wrong with the $14-million jet. Not for a minute, even in her deepest mourning, did Harduvel accept the military's version of how Ted died. Ted flew F-16 fighter jets, and a few years later, when he was stationed overseas (his family was still in Tampa), his plane crashed into a mountain during a routine training mission in South Korea on Nov. Ted and Janet soon married and had a daughter, Kiki. In real life, Harduvel was a senior at the University of Tampa, working at MacDill's officers club, serving drinks to the "bootstrappers," as she calls military personnel. HBO changes the place to a fictitious Wallace AFB in Texas and the date to 1976. Yet Afterburn almost made the mistake of portraying Harduvel that way.Īfterburn tells how Harduvel met her future husband at MacDill Air Force base in Tampa in 1973 (she says she moved from New York to Florida "so I could wear flip-flops year round"). 41, and you feel the full thrust of Harduvel's determination.
Watch her, then meet talkative, non-conformist Harduvel in her storefront astrology office on U.S. Firecracker actress Laura Dern plays Harduvel.
0 kommentar(er)
