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Thursday, August 31, 2000
The search to find out why
Determining the reason for crash of a Navy aircraft is crucial.
When an aircraft crashes, whether military or civilian, there's a rush to find out why. There is a reassurance in that process, the focus of the investigation being to root out the cause, identify it, and thereby avoid a repetition. Perhaps in no other activity except aviation does a system exist on the assumption that mistakes do not simply happen and that the cause can be isolated and fixed.
That process is now underway in the case of the giant Navy helicopter, the HM-15 Sea Dragon, that crashed Aug. 10 in the Gulf and took the lives of four men. What made this crash doubly perplexing was not only the loss of life in the accident, but that the crash was another in a growing string of mishaps involving the big choppers.
The military is now concerned enough that it has ordered the grounding of the entire fleet of such aircraft, the so-called "E" fleet made up 43 Navy Sea Dragons and the companion CH53E Super Stallion of which 165 are flown by the Marine Corps. The fleet was grounded once before, in 1996. The Navy version of the helicopter has been involved in five major crashes since 1984, altogether resulting in the loss of 30 lives.
But the grounding ought not be read, at least not yet anyway, as a loss of confidence in the aircraft, but as a sign of prudence on the part of the military brass.
All indications are that the Navy is deeply committed to finding out why its men were lost and why a valuable aircraft plunged into the Gulf of Mexico.
The grounding is not without cost. Valuable training time will be lost. And for military crews, training time is vitally important to maintain readiness to carry out their mission and to do it with the utmost safety and efficiency.
Some measures can and will be taken to keep maintain top training levels in the meantime.
But first those service members must be assured that the equipment we give them is in the best shape possible.
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