There is no direct correlation between how much time U.S. Army pilots get in the cockpit and the recent spike in catastrophic non-combat mishaps, according to the service’s safety director.
“Our data do not indicate a correlation between the execution of flight hours and mishaps,” Brig. Gen. David Francis, commander of the Army combat readiness center and director of Army safety, said at a June 13 House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces hearing. “We just cannot correlate that data, one to the other.”
An ongoing study of Army class-A aviation mishaps shows most are caused by human error. Less than one-fourth of all major mishaps are attributed to mechanical failure and none of the Army’s rotorcraft fleets suffer more class-A mishaps than others, he said.
“We do not have a specific platform that indicates to us a particular problem,” Francis said. “We have various sizes of fleets for Apaches, Chinooks and Black Hawks, but none of them are indicating to us that we have a problem in one particular area.”
Class-A mishaps — which cause $1 million in damage, a fatality or both — spike at the outset of major combat operations. As expected, more helicopters crash and more pilots are killed in the early days of conflict, Francis said.
“What we can say is our data does indicate that the Army, Army aviation, has experienced the biggest spike in class-A mishaps in conjunction with major combat operations,” he said.
Army data show a marked increase in class-A mishaps during the initial stages of Desert Storm, Bosnia and Kosovo and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Francis said.
In fiscal year 2007, during the height of the surge in Iraq, the Army suffered 2.39 class-A mishaps per 100,000 flying hours, according to Army crash data. In the 10 years that followed, the rate fell to 0.87 per 100,00 flight hours in fiscal 2016.
During fiscal 2017, the class-A mishap rate was 0.99 and the rate currently stands at 0.93 for fiscal 2018.
Read more at Rotor & Wing International.