{"id":1511916,"date":"2022-06-12T06:35:04","date_gmt":"2022-06-12T10:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1511916"},"modified":"2022-06-12T06:35:25","modified_gmt":"2022-06-12T10:35:25","slug":"aviation-mishaps-continue-to-pile-up-for-the-u-s-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/aviation-mishaps-continue-to-pile-up-for-the-u-s-military\/","title":{"rendered":"Aviation Mishaps Continue to Pile Up for the U.S. Military"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Faviation-mishaps-continue-to-pile-up-for-the-u-s-military%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1511916&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>As more bases mourn aircrews lost in a new spate of crashes, there\u2019s no one among the Pentagon\u2019s top leaders assigned to help lower-level safety officials prevent the next accident.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>That gap was a key finding in a 2020 <a href=\"https:\/\/news.usni.org\/2020\/12\/03\/report-of-national-commission-on-military-aviation-safety-on-aviation-mishaps-from-2013-to-2020\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">report<\/a> by the National Commission on Military Aviation Safety, which found that since 2013, aviation accidents had killed 224 pilots and crew, destroyed 186 aircraft, and cost the military $11.6 billion.<\/p>\n<p>In the last 10 days, five accidents have killed another six aircrew and injured several more. They include the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2022\/06\/09\/politics\/marines-killed-in-california-osprey-crash\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">June 9 crash<\/a> of an MV-22B Osprey that killed all five aboard, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.navytimes.com\/news\/your-navy\/2022\/06\/06\/navy-identifies-pilot-who-died-in-california-super-hornet-crash\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">June 3 crash<\/a> of an F\/A-18E in which the pilot died; the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.armytimes.com\/news\/your-army\/2022\/06\/06\/2-injured-in-military-helicopter-crash-in-southern-alabama\/#:~:text=OZARK%2C%20Ala.,Fort%20Rucker%20Public%20Affairs%20Office.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">June 6 crash<\/a> of an Army AH-64 Apache helicopter, which injured both aircrew; the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcsandiego.com\/news\/local\/military-aircraft-crashes-north-of-yuma-arizona-reports\/2968386\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">June 9 crash<\/a> of an MH-60S Seahawk, which injured one person; and a <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/News3LV\/status\/1532487547095355394?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1532487547095355394%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&#038;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.planeandpilotmag.com%2Fnews%2Fthe-latest%2F2022%2F06%2F03%2Fsecond-f-16-goes-off-south-dakota-runway%2F\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">June 2 incident<\/a> in which an Air National Guard F-16 skidded off a runway and damaged its nose cone.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>When the commission\u2019s investigation came out 19 months ago, it said pilots, crews and maintainers told them the crashes were happening because they weren\u2019t getting enough training flights and couldn\u2019t get spare parts to keep planes flying. The loss of competency has a snowball effect; less experienced instructors teach the next generation of pilots and maintainers.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In its work to prevent future crashes, the commission issued dozens of recommendations. Chief among those was that the Pentagon should make aviation safety a top priority by elevating accident reporting and safety oversight. This would be accomplished by creating a joint safety council to be led by the deputy defense secretary, the Pentagon\u2019s second-highest ranking civilian.<\/p>\n<div class=\"related-articles-placeholder\">\n<div class=\"related-articles\">\n<p class=\"related-articles-head\">Related articles<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Though Pentagon leaders concurred with the recommendations, the council has not been established yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Heritage Foundation senior defense fellow John Venable said crashes are going to keep happening unless the Pentagon enacts the commission\u2019s recommendation to establish a high-level Joint Safety Council\u2014and unless Congress sets a required minimum number of training flight hours, so that training can\u2019t be cut when budgets need to be stretched.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI have little faith that it\u2019s going to change,\u201d said Venable, former F-16 pilot with more than 4,400 flight hours. \u201cWhat I fear is going to have to happen is you\u2019re going to have to lose jets and you\u2019re going to have to lose enough personnel to where Congress intervenes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>With a 2022 budget of $770 billion, how can the Pentagon lack funds for spare parts and flight hours? Part of the reason is that the money always arrives late. For at least 14 of the last 20 years Congress hasn\u2019t passed a budget on time. Flight hours get cut and maintenance gets deferred as commanders meter out funds so they don\u2019t run out of money.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-media\">\n<p>Planes are going up with substandard parts. \u201cA junior Marine told the Commission that his unit was reusing expendable $5 filters on aircraft. The unit, he explained, still had missions to do even if there was no money to purchase new filters,\u201d the commission reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And aviators\u2019 skills atrophy without sufficient flight time, Venable said. \u201cWhen you get an airplane that has dozens and dozens of switches, but hundreds of options for those switches inside of each cockpit, and you ask them to fly once a week in order to maintain some level of competency, you just can&#8217;t do it,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Even when a budget gets passed and there\u2019s an influx of money, the damage is already done. Pilots, who can\u2019t get back the lost training hours, assume more risk the next time they do fly. A Heritage Foundation analysis found that average\u00a0 flight hours for Air Force fighter jets had plummeted 39 percent from 2017 to 2020. In certain airframes it was worse, according to Air Force data obtained by Heritage. F-15E Strike Eagle pilots, for example, flew an average of 19.1 hours a month in 2017, but just 6.6 hours a month in 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFlying, like surgery, and other highly technical professions, is a perishable skill that needs routine practice to maintain proficiency,\u201d the commissioners said. \u201cWhen a unit\u2019s funding is restored in the last part of the fiscal year, it simply cannot make up for lost training and deferred maintenance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-media\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"monthly sorties\" class=\"content-media content-img\" height=\"862\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Sorties.jpeg\" width=\"1024\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The 2022 fiscal year started Oct. 1, 2021; Congress did not pass the military\u2019s budget until March 11, six months late.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Lawmakers did, however, order Pentagon leaders to establish the Joint Safety Council. That order became law in December 2021 through section 372 of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A defense official told <em>Defense One <\/em>that the Pentagon\u2019s office of personnel and readiness has accepted the commission\u2019s recommendations and has been working on responses.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The commissioners said that elevating aviation safety to the highest level is the best way to ensure it remains a priority. They cited a previous 2003 defense safety oversight council that had been chartered to prevent accidents\u2014but \u201clost its top-level support, resulting in diminished stature and impact\u201d\u2014and did not hold a meeting from fiscal year 2010 through July 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This week, the House Armed Services Committee inserted language into the 2023 defense authorization bill that will require Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks to report annually to them on what the council has accomplished.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In practical terms, a high-level central office should ensure that every military mishap\u2014the Pentagon\u2019s word for \u201caccident\u201d\u2014gets reported and reported in a standard way. This in turn should help analysts spot dangerous trends. The commission said that its own investigation had been hampered because the military branches reported crash data in so many different ways.<\/p>\n<p>The commission was established by Congress in 2018 following a similar string of fatal accidents; its 2020 report and website of their work has since been taken offline, but their report remains in print form and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/news.usni.org\/2020\/12\/03\/report-of-national-commission-on-military-aviation-safety-on-aviation-mishaps-from-2013-to-2020\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">online elsewhere<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWithout empowered leadership focused on aviation safety at a high level within the department, aviation safety will never get the consistent emphasis and resourcing it needs to make saving lives and protecting investments in personnel and equipment a priority,\u201d the commission said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As more bases mourn aircrews lost in a new spate of crashes, there\u2019s no one among the Pentagon\u2019s top leaders assigned to help lower-level safety officials prevent the next accident.\u00a0That<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1511916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1511916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1511916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1511916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1511916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}