Increased Military Accident Rate
 

From Defenseone: In the last 10 days, five accidents have killed another six aircrew and injured several more. They include the June 9 crash of an MV-22B Osprey that killed all five aboard, the June 3 crash of an F/A-18E in which the pilot died; the June 6 crash of an Army AH-64 Apache helicopter, which injured both aircrew; the June 9 crash of an MH-60S Seahawk, which injured one person; and a June 2 incident in which an Air National Guard F-16 skidded off a runway and damaged its nose cone.

Link to Full Article

Any comments regarding this story?

- Ed

You are aware that aircraft accidents are not a production metric that are expected to meet a rate over time, I hope.
Interesting graphs at the link, thanks.

Yessir, Lonewolf 50, I am aware. I, too, found the graphs to be of interest, especially the falloff of practice hours correlation with accident rate. BTW, my Bride and I are seriously contemplating a move to Texas. I have family in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and Thurber. I'd enjoy a PM from you regarding pricing and general well being in the Republic. Thank You.

- Ed

Safety Pause for all USN & USMC aviation units June 13, 2022.

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-...ng-of-crashes/

Having been involved with the RAF flight safety organisation, one quip has always remained in my mind. "There are no new accidents - just new people to have them".
Obviously not strictly true and certainly not with the progress in aviation, however, very many accidents arise from the same basic causes.
Old Duffer

I'll bite. As a Senior Pentagon Reporter, the author of that story would hopefully understand that without the results from the various investigations into those five crashes, it is way too soon to throw them onto one heap and start drawing conclusions from them. While the message that is being conveyed, a lack of training hours or the use of substandard parts (an allegation worth a story on its own if true) will no doubt lead to more crashes, is of course valid, I'm not a big fan of taking a set of recent crashes and using them to push this message across the table. We don't know yet what caused those crashes so give the investigators time to do their work, and the families and loved ones time to grief, before tacking them onto this particular agenda. There may well be a significant trend here, but you need to take a bit of time and step back before you can identify it.

Nice graphs. I did not see any mention on sim's or sim hours bolstering flying hours.

Difficult to compare - the story talks about increased number of accidents which you appear to have transposed as accident 'rate' - which is usually expressed per flying hour, but the graphs only appear to go up to 2020 it seems.

I imagine that flying hours and activity have ramped up due to Ukraine but whether they are linked is probably as yet unknown.

Causal factors are not evidently common ....

Bang on mate. There are no new accidents in Aviation, just repeats. That is the saddest part of them all.

I remember an RAF run of 10 accidents in a year (mid-90s) where the combination of aircraft types and accident modes put the sequence into the 'blip' basket - there was no connection between any of them, FJ, RW, trainers, LOC-I, CFIT, engine fires, engine failures, blade strikes, etc. There were still journos out there desperately trying to prove there was a systemic problem.

As part of my job, I had to have a basic understanding of statistics and probabilities - it's really not all that hard once you think about it a bit. But the number of people who have absolutely no understanding of statistics and probabilities (even among the engineering ranks) was truly frightening.