On Jan. 20, a UH-60 Black Hawk medical evacuation helicopter crashed in a farmer's field in rural Mendon, south of Rochester, around 6:30 p.m. The three National Guard troops on board were killed.
Two weeks later, on Feb. 3, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter conducting a routine training exercise crashed south of Lucky Peak near Boise shortly after 8 p.m. All three National Guard troops on board were killed.
The tragic déjà vu of the two back-to-back crashes again calls into question how -- or if -- the Department of Defense is handling aviation crashes.
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In 2018, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report on military aviation "mishaps" -- the official term the DoD uses to categorize crashes and accidents such as the two that have occurred so far in 2021. The 2018 report found that DoD does not collect standardized aviation mishap data, lacks consensus in its reporting of causal factors, and does not consistently collect relevant training data to analyze trends in mishaps.
According to GAO's Cary Russell, director of GAO's Defense Capabilities and Management team, after the GAO provides a report such as the one on aviation mishaps, the government entity concerned must provide updates regarding whether or not certain recommendations from the report have been addressed. So, in theory, DoD should be keeping the GAO abreast of how they have improved since 2018 when it comes to aviation mishaps.
But the mishaps have continued.
In October of last year, two female aviators -- a Navy instructor and a Coast Guard student pilot -- were killed when their T-6B Texan II crashed 30 miles after taking off. This crash came only days after a Navy fighter jet crashed in the Mojave Desert, although its pilot safely ejected.
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Following those two crashes, the Navy ordered an "operational safety pause."
Months before the Navy's two crashes, in May 2020, Eglin Air Force Base similarly ordered a safety pause after pilots from the Florida base crashed two fighter jets in five days -- an F-35 and an F-22. Neither crash resulted in any deaths and the pause only impacted Eglin rather than the entire Air Force, but the goals were similar -- reassess risk mitigation efforts.
So the Air Force, the Navy and now the National Guard have all experienced crashes in quick succession in the past year. Have these operational safety pauses made any difference?
As far as was publicly released, no sweeping changes came from Eglin’s pause and none have been mandated from the Navy’s pause either. So do these pauses really do anything to help mitigate aviation mishaps? Or are they more like a time-out for commanders to think about what they did -- or did not do?
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According to the 2018 GAO report, data on crashes is essential.
Each branch has procedures and processes in place for reporting on training accidents, but those measures are not standardized across the force. “Mishaps,” the DoD’s term for these training accidents, are broadly categorized into classes. A "Class A Mishap" involves a death, or more than $2 million in damages to federal property.
But much further categorization and data is likely needed, Russell said. Accidents must be categorized by vehicle type, financial losses, deaths and investigation results in order to identify the trends and systemic issues the GAO hopes to mitigate. At this point, the DoD lacks such comprehensive data.
“If you don’t have the data then you can’t do the analysis and it makes it a lot harder to find out where changes need to be made, where there might be safety issues, or where there might be trends going in the wrong direction,” Russel said.
The GAO has not conducted any studies specifically on the benefits of safety pauses and whether or not they have any immediate impact on a given unit or branch’s safety. But if these pauses allow additional time and effort for leaders to investigate the causes behind each mishap, that data could greatly contribute to identifying the trends Russell mentioned.
“That data collection element really needs to be there,” Russell said. “It needs to be there at the service level and it needs to be there at the DoD level because that’s how you find out whether you’ve got systemic issues.”
Overall, across the Department of Defense from 2006 to 2020, 5,605 service members were killed in training accidents. This represents 32% of all reported active-duty military deaths for that time period and is double the percentage of troops killed in action.
In short, troops have died in training accidents at twice the rate that they have died in combat over the last decade and a half. More service members have died in training accidents than in combat every year since 2015.