Marine General’s Flights Raise Question of Ethics : Abuses: Top officer suspended 2 colonels for misuse of planes after he made flights to Florida and Big Bear.

Three months before he suspended two of his top aides for alleged misuse of military aircraft, the commanding general of the Marine Corps’ Western air bases ordered a government plane to shuttle him between the Marine base here and a military resort lodge at Big Bear, where he was spending time with his fiancee.

Two weeks before that, en route from the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro to a military convention in Virginia, the commander--Brig. Gen. Wayne T. Adams--flew a 552-mile side trip to Florida during a tropical storm and signed court papers in a divorce from his wife of 26 years, a Times investigation has found.

A 28-year veteran who two years ago realized his dream of earning a general’s star, Adams defended the trips as legal and said in an interview: “Every flight I’ve gone on has been a damn good training flight or (for) a commitment . . . to the Marine Corps.”

Unlike the actions of his two suspended colonels, one of whom ultimately killed himself, Adams’ trips came in the course of official military business, he said. When a pilot puts in his required air hours, the general added, “you’re not obliged to pick someplace in the middle of nowhere.”

Nonetheless, the Big Bear and Florida trips were among at least five recent flights taken by Adams, 51, that appear to raise questions about the propriety of his own use of military aircraft even as he was disciplining his staff, according to documents and interviews with military officials.

In addition to Big Bear and Florida, Adams took a flight to Washington state, where he met his fiancee in December. While commander at a Marine base in Yuma, Ariz., in 1987, he spent a weekend layover on a flight training mission visiting and playing golf with an old military friend in Pennsylvania. The following year, he ordered a plane to pick him up from Burbank after a family emergency.

The issue centers largely on what has been known for years among military aviators as “getting in your flight time.”

For pilots, this means maintaining flight certification by putting in a certain amount of time in the cockpit--in Adams’ case, 50 hours a year. But according to several longtime military officers, for some fliers it also has meant taking care of personal matters--like golfing, fishing, seeing girlfriends, or attending to business--once the plane touches down.

Navy and Marine Corps regulations prohibit the mixing of personal and military business when military aircraft are used, and generally warn against any use that could be misinterpreted by the public.

The issue shot to public attention in January when Cols. Joseph Underwood, chief of staff at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, and James Sabow, an assistant chief of staff for flight operations, were relieved of their duties amid an investigation into such allegations by the Marine Corps Inspector General.

Underwood, stripped by Adams of the No. 2 post in the Western air bases at El Toro, Tustin, Camp Pendleton, and Yuma, Ariz., was accused of abusing his flight time repeatedly to go on golfing jaunts around the country.

The 29-year Marine ultimately pleaded guilty to these and other, non-flight charges in a closed hearing before Adams, working out an agreement to pay fines and leave the military while at the same time avoiding a court-martial and holding onto his pension.

The most serious allegation against Sabow appears to have centered on a flight he took to Spokane, Wash., in a C-12 Beechcraft last year.

Sabow brought along stereo speakers, throw rugs, some beer signs and other items to give to his son at school in the Spokane area, military officials and his family said.

But the allegations against Sabow never were pursued because on Jan. 22, five days after he was suspended for suspected misuse of base planes, the 51-year-old Marine shot himself to death on his El Toro patio with a shotgun, according to an autopsy report.

Adams, who was never interviewed as part of the January investigation, has insisted that the case of Underwood and Sabow, who were good friends, was an isolated instance of abuse.

But an independent review of Adams’ own flight records bolsters charges by Sabow’s family, Underwood and others that the colonels’ actions may be standard and accepted practice at the highest level of the Western air base command.

As commander of the four air bases under the Marine Western command, Adams oversees about 4,600 personnel. Although most of the planes are assigned to the air groups that occupy those bases, the base command also has several T-39 trainer jet aircraft, C-12 Beechcraft and UH-1 Huey aircraft for cargo, transport and training use.

The El Toro command has authority over all base planes at its other three bases. As Adams said when asked whether a particular aircraft was assigned to El Toro or to Yuma, “I own all those planes--I own Yuma too.”

Adams--a veteran of 3,800 flight hours known as “Bear” among his fellow fliers--took at least three of the questionable flights in his first three months on the job at El Toro.

According to five high-ranking military officers, some or all of the four trips taken by Adams since 1987 and detailed by The Times could pose legal problems. The officers agreed that the trip to Florida last year offers on its face the most clear-cut violation of military policy.

Told of a general who finalized his divorce en route to a military convention, the Inspector General, Maj. Gen. Hollis Davison, said: “That would seem difficult to justify.”

Adams was taking part in a Marine Corps Aviation Assn. convention in Norfolk, Va., over the weekend of Oct. 12. On the way, he and a co-pilot in the C-12 made refueling stops in New Mexico and New Orleans and planned to head to Tampa, Fla., at Adams’ suggestion.

But Tropical Storm Marco, toppling trees and power lines throughout the Florida Gulf Coast at wind speeds of up to 65 m.p.h., changed that plan. Instead, they flew inland to Orlando International Airport, “circumnavigating” the storm, Adams said.

Adams said he took the 552-mile side trip to Florida by design because it offered “one of the best training flights” for testing weather conditions and using the flight instruments.

But once on the ground, Adams--a native of South Florida who maintains state residency there--also rented a car on the morning of Oct. 11 and drove to Hillsborough County Court in Tampa to sign the papers ending his 26-year marriage to Connie Lynne Adams.

His commercial lodging for the night of Oct. 10 was paid for by the military; Adams says that he paid for the rental car.

Adams said that he did not have to sign the divorce papers when he did and that this was not the reason he stopped in Florida. With his busy schedule, he maintained, it just seemed like “the most expeditious way” to use his time.

In a letter to his ex-wife a few days after the trip, Adams said the Virginia convention “tied in with the required trip to Tampa. I needed C-12 time so took a C-12 to Florida and then to Norfolk.”

Less than three weeks later, he made a trip to Big Bear with his fiancee for what he termed a combination of business and pleasure.

For the first day of his stay there, Adams said, he did an official inspection of a Marine Corps-owned recreational facility at the resort. “When you take command of something, a new commander goes to visit everything under his command,” Adams said.

After the inspection, Adams took the next two days at Big Bear as leave.

Adams drove up to Big Bear with his fiancee, but a memorial service at the base for another general’s wife, which Adams had known about beforehand, broke up the trip. Adams said he wasn’t obligated to go, but felt he should. He said he called the El Toro base and said “come get me.”

The C-12 took Adams to El Toro and immediately after the memorial service, shuttled him back to Big Bear to finish his leave.

The general said: “It was absolutely appropriate for me to be (back at El Toro) for that. . . . There’s nothing wrong with interrupting either official business or leave to bring a commander on a short trip to participate in something like that.”

It was also in the interest of seeing to his duties that Adams said he had a C-12 pick him up from Burbank Airport on March 6, 1988, after a family tragedy.

Then-Col. Adams was base commander at Yuma. He and his wife at the time, Lynne, chartered a plane from Yuma on the night that their 19-month-old granddaughter was killed and their daughter-in-law critically injured in a traffic accident.

Adams decided to leave for Yuma the next day and get back home. He could have taken a commercial plane, Adams said, but after spending $450 from the charter plane, decided instead to call for the C-12 to pick him up.

Adams called this “perfectly acceptable.” But Marine Corps spokeswoman Maj. Nancy LaLuntas in Washington said military policy does not allow an aircraft to be sent out on an unscheduled route for an officer’s travel even in a family emergency.

“There is the possibility that an exception might occur,” she said, for instance in the case of a vital organ transplant, “but I’ve never heard of one.”

According to Navy and Marine Corps flight regulations, overnight flights away from a plane’s home base “should not be authorized except when necessary in the direct interest of the U.S. government or in the course of normal training of flight personnel whose employment is such that their flight training would be otherwise inadequate.”

The regulations go on to stipulate that “the use of aircraft for nonessential flights shall not be authorized. Any flight open to misinterpretation by the public shall be avoided.” Routine business, trips to hometowns and flights coinciding with sporting events are all given as examples of this prohibition.

Adams maintained that his one-night layover flights are clearly distinguishable from those he said Underwood took as chief of staff because Underwood stayed at his destination for several days.

This was the case, he said, when he flew to McChord Air Force Base in Washington on Dec. 20 during a snowstorm and returned the next day. His fiancee met him there after driving four hours from the Seattle area, he said.

The general said he was not “going to a destination, parking the airplane, say, on a Friday and coming back on a Sunday with the airplane sitting there doing nothing (while) you’re not getting any training, you’re out playing golf.”

But this appears to be just what Adams did on a weekend trip to Pennsylvania in May, 1987, when he visited and played golf with an Army friend living at the Army War College base in Carlisle.

“We’d encouraged him to come out for several months,” said retired Army Col. Don A. Schwab, “and he told us, ‘Well someday, I’ll get my cross-country (flight time) and I’ll be out there.’ ” Adams planned to stay two nights but ended up staying a third because of plane trouble, Schwab said.

Adams said he was not sure how many nights he stayed, but added: “A two-night RON (remain overnight) is something that is done--not all that frequently, but it is permissible. . . . There’s nothing wrong (with going) somewhere if somebody happens to be there that you know. . . . You don’t have to fly out into the middle of a desert” to get training.

In some cases, Adams said, trips of several days are justified if the level of flight training is particularly difficult. He said this was the case with his Pennsylvania trip, but not with Underwood’s flights.

“It was no big deal at all,” Schwab said of the trip. “The one thing you should know is this is a guy who’s an absolutely super solid citizen . . . (and) does things on the up-and-up.”

GEN. ADAMS’ TRAVEL

These are three trips that Brig. Gen. Wayne T. Adams, commanding general of the Marine Corps Air’ Western air stations at El Toro, Tustin, Camp Pendleton, and Yuma, Az., took in his first three months after assuming command at El Toro on Sept. 28, 1990. The mixing of personal business while on military training flights is being questioned.

Florida: On his way to a military aviators’ convention in Norfolk, Va., Adams--who was piloting a Marine C-12 Beechcraft-- made one of three stops in Orlando. He drove to Tampa to sign his divorce decree. Adams says the trip was designed to give him needed flight time.

Big Bear: While at Big Bear with his fiancee, Adams had a C-12 fly to the mountain airport Oct. 29 and take him back to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station to attend a memorial service for a general’s wife. Afterward, he was taken back to Big Bear in the C-12. Adams says the trip was partly for a military inspection and partly for a vacation.

Washington: On Dec. 20, Adams flew in the C-12 with a co-pilot to McChord AFB in Washington state. Adams said the purpose of the trip was to get in flight time. Once there, he met his fiancee, who he said drove four hours through a snowstorm from the Seattle area. He left the next day and flew back to El Toro.

Source: Marine Corps Flight Records and Gen. Adams