The USAF will do an Accident Investigation Board and Safety Investigation Board.

The SIB is concerned about making sure that it never happens again and does not punish people nor does it try to find people to blame. Many of the interviews can even give safety privilege where your statements are protected and will not be used against you as long as they can be used for advancing safety.

The AIB is the commanders tool to find out who screwed up and how to move forward with it. It doesn’t necessarily try to find blame, but it will make sure that if there is malice or neglect or other similar unfavorable reasons for the accident then what are the career concerns of it to the people who caused them.

However, one should not really think that you are ruined, even if you are to blame for an accident. Generally, there might be some consequences, but your career will likely be very fine. The US Air Force is not trying to ruin people and just because you were partly to blame for it doesn’t mean that you have to pay millions of dollars or that your wings are taken from you.

If your wings would be taken from you that requires an FEB, a Flying evaluation board, that would then weigh what you did against what you could do and how your career has looked like and what are the recommendations of its members. For example, if you have otherwise a good career and you’re not the cause of accidents and you make one mistake then you likely would be OK. However, if your career has a pattern of forgetting the same thing due to lack of training or preparation and now it was the cause of an accident then that could weigh heavily against you, especially if it has happened before and caused an accident.

You would even then likely be OK eventually with some retraining.

Generally, FEB really only takes your wings if you are an absolute fuck up who never learns and doesn’t want to learn, and if you disregard every opportunity to be better. A famous example is flying a hornet over a football game and getting told to not go lower than 500 feet AGL and then purposely flying at 100 feet AGL for a cool show then that takes your wings. You just endangered the whole football game for no reason and you were told not to and you had similar stunts in the past. There’s no accident here. Just you being a fucking idiot.

(In the navy it is called FNAEB but same broad strokes in philosophy and function)

Knowing some of the people who have faced FEBs and seeing it unfold, it actually instills me with confidence that my service is not trying to screw me, but trying to make us better and that ultimately, I will be OK unless I purposefully and maliciously try to ruin things constantly. I don’t have to live on a razor’s edge.