Military Crashes and Safety Record

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https://patch.com/georgia/savannah/plane-reportedly-down-port-wentworth-near-savannah
It seems lately there has been a slew of military airplane crashes. For all the millions of dollars of tax payers money spent on pilot training, maintenance, and equipment, I am wondering what underlying causes of these are? I am not talking about combat realted accidents. Can any current or ex-military pilots shed light on this? Also, it doesn’t seem, at least in the media, it gets the same attention as passenger airlines. Or cargo.
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Not much hard data to support conclusions but because we are an up/out organization many of us suspect it’s the 2nd/3rd order consequence of under funding an entire generation of pilots. During sequestration we had pilots flying hours at the bare minimum of safety. Those pilots eventually moved on to be IPs and then field grade Majors/LCDRs. Though all “qualified” their body of work and experience is not equal to their predecessors. It’s not uncommon for Commanding Officers to only have 1500-2000 hours of flight time now but when I started out - 300 hours per year was a good target....now it’s 100-150 averaged over 15 years.
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Quote: Not much hard data to support conclusions but because we are an up/out organization many of us suspect it’s the 2nd/3rd order consequence of under funding an entire generation of pilots. During sequestration we had pilots flying hours at the bare minimum of safety. Those pilots eventually moved on to be IPs and then field grade Majors/LCDRs. Though all “qualified” their body of work and experience is not equal to their predecessors. It’s not uncommon for Commanding Officers to only have 1500-2000 hours of flight time now but when I started out - 300 hours per year was a good target....now it’s 100-150 averaged over 15 years.
Around the time I got out of the Army it was embarrassing how little the average pilot flew. Army regulations require someone to fly every 60 days or else they need to have a checkride to re-establish currency. As an Instructor pilot, I spent ALL of 2016 giving proficiency checks instead of doing mission oriented training. Our line pilots were simply mismanaged, under appreciated, and constantly forced to attend non-aviation related training. Example, we have to cancel Mr. So-and-so's training flight tonight because he has to attend an Anti-trafficking brief at 0600 tomorrow. There is a time and a place for these things but the military MUST realize that our flight crews are not normal individuals and need to be treated as such. An Army pilot should be practicing his trade of flying aircraft in combat, not ruck marching and assaulting buildings. We have other people that do that. It's embarrassing to have more accidents in a non deployed environment than during a deployment. This happens because we use our dwell time to get the meaningless BS out of the way instead of flying to proficiency. During an actual deployment, the funding is in place to allow for alot of flying and training.

It should be noted, however, that the things asked of military aircrews is much more dangerous than civilian IFR flying. It should be expected to see more accidents while doing precarious things in an aircraft. Recently though we have seen far more military accidents than normal. I am curious to see the cause of this latest C130 crash. God bless them all.
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Might be pilot training hours funding, or it might be a lot of other things related to the strain on the services over the last 15 years... material, cultural/moral, attrition.

DoD knows it needs to reset and recapitalize. But it looks to me like that budgeting needs to account for sustained, indefinite low-intensity conflict. We used to be in the habit of going into four-alarm-fire mode when actual warfighting had to be done... that worked OK for a few months, but not years or decades.
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Quote: Might be pilot training hours funding, or it might be a lot of other things related to the strain on the services over the last 15 years... material, cultural/moral, attrition.

DoD knows it needs to reset and recapitalize. But it looks to me like that budgeting needs to account for sustained, indefinite low-intensity conflict. We used to be in the habit of going into four-alarm-fire mode when actual warfighting had to be done... that worked OK for a few months, but not years or decades.
Nailed it. Years of conflict, funding issues, low morale, all the experience is leaving. I think it all contributes to the current state of military aviation.
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The DoD won't admit to it, and it's too early to draw conclusions, but those of us invested in this game do recognize the greening out of the squadrons and the logical progression towards higher hull losses. The chickens will slowly come home to roost, at the clip we're going.
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As one of our monitors wrote, “The Marine Corps doesn’t care about your qualifications, designations or flight experience. They care about your green side” Physical fitness score, FITREP perfection, picture, and other “well rounded” qualities that have little to do with your MOS credibility and more to do with your ability to promote.
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As an Army pilot with almost 20 years of IP, examiner, and Safety officer time I have seen/experienced great change with military aviation culture. Today's O-4/O-5s are more concerned with career KD time and PowerPoint metrics (e.g., flu shots and late OERs) versus having a safe/proficient flying force. Most WOs are counting the months, days, hours, and minutes to punch-out time. It really is a travesty.
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Not unlike the Navy PAC fleet with their surface combatants collisions and groundings. They seem to have forgotten the basics. How does a surface combatant with Aegis radar, sonar, lookouts, a Combat Information Center, and watch stander son the bridge run into a container ship that can only do 12-14 Knots flat-out?

For that matter, how do you ACCIDENTALLY upload six nukes and fly them from Minot to Barkesdale without the crew even noticing they have six nukes under their wing? Damn, it's stenciled on the warhead.

There are a lot if problems in the military right now for a lot of reasons, and inadequate resources is only one of them.
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Quote: https://patch.com/georgia/savannah/plane-reportedly-down-port-wentworth-near-savannah
It seems lately there has been a slew of military airplane crashes. For all the millions of dollars of tax payers money spent on pilot training, maintenance, and equipment, I am wondering what underlying causes of these are? I am not talking about combat realted accidents. Can any current or ex-military pilots shed light on this? Also, it doesn’t seem, at least in the media, it gets the same attention as passenger airlines. Or cargo.
I was a C-130 Pilot and Aircraft Accident Investigator back in the 1980's.

The C-130 that just crashed was 60 years old:

9 Puerto Ricans killed in final flight of 60-year-old National Guard plane - Chicago Tribune

From eyewitness accounts (notoriously inaccurate) the plane entered a steep bank and crashed just after takeoff. Sounds like wing structural failure. That happened many years ago to a Little Rock based C-130. For quite a while we had restrictions on maneuvers until all the cracked wing 130's were fixed. They called them "Level 1" and "Level 2" restrictions.

Edit: just found video of the crash, not quite as sure about what I just wrote above:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/02/us/mi...gia/index.html

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