I hope someone will have memory of this.

In the mid 80's when I was still active duty, at a staff meeting it was announced that there had been a plane crash and a general and a former chief master sgt of the Air Force had been killed. (Chief Master sgt of the Air Force is a unique posistion that only one person at a time holds.) The very first one was April 3, 1967 and currently a female holds the posistion and there have only been 19.) The person that announced this was a Chief Master sgt and he said that Chiefs and Senior Master sgts that were Chief selectees were going to collect funds to start a memorial. My thought was that he was an advocate for ALL enlisted so why would it be limited? Works out they did not raise enough and then they wanted help from non chiefs. I had been excluded before so I'll remain that way.

Recently I told my son in law about this and he did not remember it. I could not remember their names. Doing research, there was a plane crash that killed General O'Malley and his wife, but there was no Chief listed. This was in 1985 and by that time there had only been 8 or 9 Chief Master sgts of the Air Force. So I was able to narrow it down that it had to of been Chief Master Sgt Richard D. Kistling. Here's the problem. Chief Kistling did die in 1985 and he died at Lanley AFB in Virginia. But his date of death is not the date of the airplane crash and his cause of death was listed as a disease. I believe the fact are listed incorrectly. I hope someone has knowledge of this and can confirm it or set me straight if I'm mistaken.

I did read that on military plane crashes they don't always list all the deaths.

Here's a list of all the Chief MSgts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...ant_of_the_Air_Force

A click through has none of them perishing in a plane crash. Here's a memorial to Kisling that states (one of several articles that all say the same thing) he died from ALS (Lou Gehrigs disease):

https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0396kisling/

Guessing it was someone from a different but similar sounding rank?

Mark, thanks for the response. I have researched and seen the info you provided. Somehow 2 and 2 is not four and I'm 100% positive my 2 was the way it was related in 1985?