Fy '04 Mishaps

[KBayDog]

While I put as much stock in CNN as I do Michael Moore, I was hoping this article could generate a good discussion. Does anyone have any thoughts as to why things were the way they were in '04? (Or, if they are actually as bad as this article portrays?)
KBD


Marines probe rise in aviation mishaps
Commandant: Training mistakes hurting anti-terror efforts
From Mike Mount
CNN Washington Bureau



WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A sharp increase in deadly accidents involving U.S. Marine Corps aircraft has forced a close look at possible causes, officials said Tuesday.

From October 2003 through September 2004, the Marines sustained 18 major accidents, including the deaths of 15 aviators and the loss of 21 helicopters and fighter planes.

Most of the accidents came during training missions in the United States. The others occurred during combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those numbers mark the worst year for Marine Corps aviation safety in more than 10 years, according to Marine records.

More Marine aviators were killed in accidents over the fiscal year that ended September 30 than were shot down by enemy fire, according to Marine officials.

The accidents cited are those termed "Class A" -- mishaps in which at least one person died or at least $1 million in damage occurred to an aircraft.

Marine officials set a mishap goal of 2.9 Class A accidents per 100,000 flying hours, but the rate for the 2004 fiscal year ended at 5.3 accidents per 100,000 flying hours.

By comparison, the Marines sustained 11 major accidents in the previous period, or 2.9 major accidents per 100,000 flying hours.

Accidents included the collision of two Marine F-18 Hornet fighters over the Atlantic Ocean; the crash of a UH-1 helicopter that killed four people during a night training mission; and the collision of two F-18 Hornets over Oregon that killed the two pilots.

Marine officials denied that the increased pace of combat operations contributed to the high accident rate, saying it was due instead to a leadership problem in the aviation ranks.

"We are currently taking significant losses from a self-induced internal threat: non-combat mishaps," the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Michael Hagee, wrote to his aviation commanders in July.

"Our peacetime training mistakes are significantly degrading our ability to prosecute the Global War on Terrorism," he said.

The officials said that recommendations to hold commanders and squadrons accountable are expected to be announced in January.

Some commanders have already been relieved. In one case, five commanders from a Marine squadron in Iraq were fired in October because of a high accident rate within that group.

One month into the new fiscal year, the Marines have sustained no major aviation accidents.

 

[Clux4]

"The officials said that recommendations to hold commanders and squadrons accountable are expected to be announced in January.

Some commanders have already been relieved. In one case, five commanders from a Marine squadron in Iraq were fired in October because of a high accident rate within that group."

Has the case ever been otherwise?

 

[jarhead]

Marine officials denied that the increased pace of combat operations contributed to the high accident rate, saying it was due instead to a leadership problem in the aviation ranks.

"We are currently taking significant losses from a self-induced internal threat: non-combat mishaps," the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Michael Hagee, wrote to his aviation commanders in July.

"Our peacetime training mistakes are significantly degrading our ability to prosecute the Global War on Terrorism," he said.

Marine hornet perspective ...

all but one of the '04 Hornet class A mishaps were pilot error and all of the Hornet class A's were during training hops. Hq USMC is quick to blame the leadership instead of the high op tempo ... it's a shame that they don't realize that non-deployed squadron pilots are averaging less than 10 hours a month while deployed squadrons are getting 25-30+ hours a month. to go along with minimal flighttime, non-deployed squadron pilots have 2 or 3 collateral duties to worry about (instead of focusing on studying & sims since they aren't flying much) and combat deployed squadrons basically turn over their collateral duties to the SNCO's & totally focus on the mission at hand.

we had a MAG wide AOM a few months ago in which we broke into small groups & discussed what the problem was ... what i mentioned above is a synopsis of what came from nearly every one of those groups, and it was gaffed off, instead blaming it on leadership. sad. the bosses said they had the same complaints back in the day when they were JO's, yet they fail to remember back in the day they were flying brank new jets getting 300 hours a month & bagging traps like it was cool (hmm, maybe that is why the Hornets now are falling apart & having so many maintenance issues...)

[complaining/rant]
the Hornets in the last 5 years have become the bastard child of the Marine fixed wing community. why aren't Harriers crashing like they used to? because most of them are deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan, and the money (for maintenance & upgrades) is being directed to them. ever since the Harriers were found useless over Bosnia/Serbia back in the middle to late 90's (due to a poor comms suite, limited, if any, aircraft with GPS, limited night capability, poor altitude performance, and limited precision weapons employment capability, as well as them crashing left & right), the Marine Corps has been funnelling money into them to get them up to modern standards (i.e. to work joint Ops with the Squids, Zoomies & foreigners) as well as a way to justify buying the VSTOL version of the JSF. since the "war on terror" began, the Harrier has been deployed & flown more combat Ops than the Hornet (yet the Hornets have dropped more ordnance than the Harrier). might sound like i'm trying to blast the Harriers, i'm not, it's just sad the Marine Corps is half assing it's aviation side and then trying to blame it on poor leadership. either do it the right way, or just get out of the fixed wing strike business. what's going to happen is the brass is going to fall back into the zero defect mentality (it's already started after those Skid fellas got relieved & the skipper of 1/6 was relieved). [end rant]

these are hard, lean times for the Corps, must press ...

my 2¢ tirade

S/F

 

[Clux4]

Thanks jarhead.
Old aircrafts and tired crew leads to crashing birds. Can you imagine that some Reserve squadrons are still flying Alphas while some Active squadrons are still flying Charlies (lot 13's I think - not sure) Then you blame the leadership for the crash of those things that need to be sold to some foreigners.

 

[NavyOCS]

This is interesting. Have any of you guys read "BOYD"? Back in the 50's when Boyd was at Nellis training in the f-100 hun there was at least one to two accidents a week!These planes were so dangerous they were known as Lieutanant killers. These guys were training so much and training to as close to combat situations as possible that they were crashing all of the time. If you survived nellis your ready for war. Was the leadership ever questioned... hell no. They were preparing for war.
Sending these men up ill-practiced and then blaming the leadership? Well, the highers are not going to implicate themselves.

 

[skidkid]

The bottom line is that we are flying perfectly good airplanes into the ground and each other a lot more often than we should be. There are many reasons for this many have already been mentioned. In our community a guy could expect a solid year to train before deploying out and that just isnt happening anymore six months is sometimes hard to come by. The other problem is (and Im not trying to say back in my day or any other BS like that) flight school has changed and not necessarily for the better. Guys are showing up at the fleet with 4 or 5 downs in flight school. It used to be 2 or 3 and youre gone. This is contributing but it isnt the young inexperienced guys that are crashing it is the peak of their game senior captains that are doing it. I dont have any answers on waht we can do but something needs to be done. I think the leadership needs to admit we need some damn money now not for future programs and get our birds healthy and get us some flight time and we need to police our own and enforce the standards. It isnt a safety program that will get us out of this it is professional aviating. If you fly the profiles the way they are supposed to be flown you should be fine.
Im off the soap box and off to bed.

 

[bch]

The bottom line is that we are flying perfectly good airplanes into the ground and each other a lot more often than we should be. There are many reasons for this many have already been mentioned. In our community a guy could expect a solid year to train before deploying out and that just isnt happening anymore six months is sometimes hard to come by. The other problem is (and Im not trying to say back in my day or any other BS like that) flight school has changed and not necessarily for the better. Guys are showing up at the fleet with 4 or 5 downs in flight school. It used to be 2 or 3 and youre gone. This is contributing but it isnt the young inexperienced guys that are crashing it is the peak of their game senior captains that are doing it. I dont have any answers on waht we can do but something needs to be done. .

I would have to agree with you. When I first got to advanced, people were getting the boot who could not hack it. Now there are guys who have failed EVERY checkride there was in the program, getting winged. I think a lot of it has to do with the new AF style grading system. A lot of the IP's are still trying to figure it out, hence the command seems hesitant to give people the boot, when they were an experiment (meaning one of the first classses.)

 

[SFgirl]

Have any of you guys read "BOYD"? .

This sounds like a good read. Is this the title of the book or the author or both?

 

[NavyOCS]

Its actually "BOYD"... The fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War. Its about the life of John Boyd and how he exposed the Air Force's ineffeciencies. Alot of good history and insight into the extreme bueacracy in the Pentagon.

 

[Broadsword2004]

I started reading the book "The Right Stuff" recently and its the same thing, lots of crashes with those old jet planes.

And then the ejection seats. I knew ejection seats back then had like I think it was a 50/50 success rate, but they literally ejected the pilot by exploding a nitroglycerine charge under the seat, which was risking cuz you risked blowing off your limbs or legs. And then sometimes you hit your head on the canopy, or you skinned the flesh off your face ejecting, or sometimes the parachute wouldn't open (the one guy ejected and fell all the way to the airfield right in front of the group of people who gathered to watch him eject---his parachute wouldn't open (they gathered cuz he reported that there was a leak and his controls would die before he could re-land, so they told him to align up the plane a certain way, then eject, which he did. Supposedly he could have manually opened the chute, but he nevered bothered).

So they are passing half-***** pilots through flight training now, or was that just temporary due to some confusion?

Also, jarhead, what do you mean by the "zero defect mentality?"

 

[Broadsword2004]

Also, this is just my opinion, but if I were a pilot and had failed everything, I'd feel kind of nervous being given wings. You are gonna be called on to to defend lives and control a multi-million dollar aircraft, and Marine aircraft ahve to land on carriers, which is difficult.

 

[HueyCobra8151]

I looked on google for about 30 minutes trying to find the FY04 Mishaps by Class and Aircraft. I remember they used to always have that info on the back cover of Naval Safety Magazines.

Anyway, as I recall, (at least in the R/W community) UH-1N's always had the most accidents, with CH-46's coming in a close second.

From a maintainers point of view, this (obviously) is a result of the age of the airframe. But a correctable problem, that was noted by several people (including QA) in my old Chain of Command, was the sometimes baffling TD's and AFC's that would come out.

The one that really stands out in my mind is the update of the Huey drivetrain from the old grease couplings/C-Clamps to the Cobra style Thomas Couplings.

Initially this seemed like a good thing, because it allowed for more compatibility between the two aircraft, but right after they made that change, there started being excessive problems with cracks in the tailbooms, spar caps, and vert fins. This caused a Marine Corps wide stand down.

It got to the point where I would spend fully half of my DNT aft of the engines looking at all the structural ribs for cracks; and still be afraid of maybe missing an invisible hairline crack when I was signing off the Part A.

Not sure what my main point is I suppose, because I cannot presume to know more than the engineers. That is just how we saw it on the maintenance side of the house.

IMO you are never going to 100% eliminate pilot error, because people make mistakes (training mitigates that of course, but I cannot comment on that). However, everything needs to be done on the ground to ensure that the aging air frames are still airworthy.

Here is the press release on the eventual fix they came out with for this.

Notice the oversize driveshafts that barely fit under the driveshaft cover. Another problem is that even moderate torque can sometimes shift the drivetrain enough so that the thomas couplings touch the airframe or the cover above it.

 

[Broadsword2004]

Yeah, but I mean, and even though I personally have no idea how good a flier I would be, I don't get why they'd pass bad pilots through.

 

[Broadsword2004]

So you mean the Corps is in a "everyone must be perfect" sort of mindset right now?

 

[Clux4]

Yeap. You are a freaking machine for christ sake. "The most deadly weapon on earth is a Marine and his rifle" does this sound familiar? It is all part of the "Zero defect mentality". I choose to refer to this as BRAINWASH.

Offcourse not everyone will agree with me on this.