Joe’s Black Hawk helicopter was coming in to land on a training exercise when everything went wrong. The rotors kicked up a thick cloud that blotted out the ground and sky, disorienting the pilot. Then the tail rotor failed. With the helicopter spinning, Joe remembers an odd state of calm. “I didn’t think we were going to die. I knew we were already dead.”
A sickening impact left him in a daze before his crewmates’ yelling brought him back. “I looked down and moved my fingers and toes and was like, oh, OK. There’s a whole bunch of work to do.”
Joe’s initial relief over their survival gave way to disappointment as his National Guard unit’s leaders quickly moved on from the accident. They rubber-stamped an outside investigation and only required a one-off, “check the box” remedial exercise, showing no interest in changing how they planned and executed missions, he said — especially worrying given the rising numbers of Army helicopter crashes in recent years (Forbes is using a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation). Joe eventually left. Dozens of other members of his 50-member unit would also leave over the next two years, in part due to safety concerns, he and a former teammate said.
Now after last week’s tragic collision of an Army Black Hawk with a passenger jet in Washington, D.C., which left 67 dead, Joe told Forbes he’s hoping it will force conversations about safety that he and other Army aviation veterans say aren’t happening enough.
“The Army has a flying problem,” he said. “Now that the Army is killing civilians and dumping airliners out of the sky, they have to listen.”
In fiscal 2024, the Army had 15 flight accidents claiming 11 lives that it classified as Class A mishaps, the most severe kind. It’s the most in a decade. And it followed a year in which nine Class A flight accidents killed 14, the most lives lost since 2010. Army crash investigators have identified human error as the primary factor in 82% of Class A accidents over the past five years.
The Army didn’t respond to questions from Forbes before publication of this article.
Among the reasons for the rising number of accidents that the Army has acknowledged: Greener aircrews. Experienced aviators have exited in high numbers following the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and a steep drawdown in Iraq. The Army’s answer has been to improve training practices. “We got to go back and look at the basics of what we do, just from a stick and rudder standpoint,” Brigadier General Matt Braman, the director of Army aviation, said at a conference in September. The Black Hawk that crashed into an American Airlines regional jet last week was on a night training flight.
But there aren’t enough helicopters available for initial pilot training, current and former Army aviators told Forbes, and active-duty and National Guard aircrews simply aren’t getting enough flying hours in peacetime. Army aircraft, 95% of which are helicopters, flew an average of 198 hours in 2023, according to a Congressional Budget Office report, down a third from the peak in 2011. In the previous decade, “there was a deployment on the horizon for everybody so they wanted everyone to be trained up,” said a member of Joe’s National Guard unit. “But as soon as the war stops, the funding stops.”
Getting in enough flying hours to meet minimum requirements has been a challenge, current and former Army aviators told Forbes. And the bare minimums aren’t steep: Air crewmembers have to fly once every 60 days; Black Hawk aviators must log 48 hours every six months. Among the reasons for the struggle to meet flight minimums: time-consuming organizational scutwork heaped on pilots; insufficient funds to buy fuel; and shortages of skilled personnel like instructors and maintenance test pilots.
Many aviators cram in much of their flying close to the deadline, leaving them dangerously out of practice much of the year, they said.
The obstacles to getting in the air are so serious that in fiscal year 2023, active-duty units only flew 80% of the 334,000 hours they had funding for. And the Army is deliberately aiming lower this year: amid budget pressures, it planned to reduce flying time by a quarter from 2023’s goal. For aircrews in Army combat aviation brigades, that would work out to just 8.7 hours of flying per month, 18% less than the flight time budgeted for 2023.
The reduced flying time has become doubly concerning as the Army’s aviator corps has grown less experienced. For the past 10 years, the Army, along with the other military branches, has struggled to keep veteran pilots, with some burned out by wartime service and others unenthused about “burning holes in the sky” in training exercises. Congress has raised pilot retention bonuses but it hasn’t effectively countered the siren song of airlines, which boosted salaries post-pandemic to address their own pilot shortage. The average career flight time of Army aviators in 2023 was 300 hours lower than in 2013.
To refill the ranks, the Army has increased recruiting and in 2020 extended new pilots’ service obligation to 10 years from six. Currently almost 1,400 rookies are starting flight training a year, up from a low of 980 over the past two decades. That’s resulted in a spike in junior warrant officers, who now make up double the share of Army pilots compared to 2016. It’s also resulted in greener pilots being promoted to instructors, Army aviation veterans told Forbes.
In initial training, which lasts about a year and a half, student pilots aren’t getting consistent flight time, in part because many of the training helicopters — the Airbus H-145 — are often not available, sources told Forbes. The Army’s hopes of cost savings from using a civilian off-the shelf model have been thwarted by a lack of spare parts, they told Forbes, including a mechanic who maintains the aircraft. “If we have 40% flyable, we’re doing pretty good,” he told Forbes on condition of anonymity to protect his job.
Students are still flying the required number of hours, but due to the helicopter shortage, they’re forced to skip days and fly more on the ones when they can get in the cockpit to catch up, said an instructor pilot with an Army National Guard unit who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. That’s detrimental, he said. “If I can put you in an aircraft for an hour and a half every single day, you’re going to learn more,” he said. “Their base is just not as strong.”
It’s unclear yet whether experience or rustiness played a role in Wednesday’s tragedy in Washington.
The Black Hawk was flown by Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Eaves, an instructor pilot with 1,000 hours of flight time, and Capt. Rebecca Lobach, who had 500 hours and had qualified to be a pilot in command.
A few decades ago, “that wouldn’t have been considered extremely high time,” said a former Army helicopter pilot and safety officer who flew from the late 1980s through the late 2000s, when aviators racked up hundreds of hours a year in Iraq and Afghanistan and in preparing for deployment. “That would be a junior [instructor], junior pilot,” he said on condition of anonymity because he flies for the Army as a contractor.
The aviators belonged to the 12th Aviation Brigade, which is tasked with flying Pentagon brass and other VIPs around the D.C. area, and evacuating them in emergencies. It’s a standard three-year duty assignment that pilots rotate through. The flying isn’t hard in many respects – “Just take off from a helipad, fly to another helipad,” said Kenneth Biddulph, who was a pilot in command in the 12th in the early 2000s. But the skies in Washington are heavily congested, with three airports and sweeping security restrictions.
The 12th conducts extensive training for pilots to familiarize themselves, he said. Before they’re allowed to command a flight, pilots have to memorize the approved helicopter routes that snake through the region and the maximum and minimum altitudes along the way so they don’t have to look down at a map, said Biddulph.
“It’s an airspace that has a lot going on, but Army pilots are kind of used to that because Fort Novosel [the main base for Army aviation] is the most heavily trafficked heliport in the world,” he said.
Despite that training, the Black Hawk was flying roughly 100 feet above the maximum of 200 feet and to the west of the route it was supposed to fly when it crashed into the jet, which was descending to land at Reagan National Airport.
In a briefing for reporters Thursday, Jonathan Koziol, a chief of staff at Army headquarters, called for patience in drawing conclusions on the causes of the accident until investigators complete their work, but he suggested that flying skills and knowledge of the area weren’t the problem. “It was a very experienced group,” he said.
Army brass have said they’re addressing at least some of the deeper problems. In April, the service ordered all units to conduct extra training sessions after 12 crashes in the span of six months killed 10 people. At an Army conference in September, Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus acknowledged pilots have been pushed through training too quickly. In October, the Army posted a request for proposals from contractors to provide pilot instruction and a new helicopter. It says the aim is to “improve the quality of training provided to our new aviators, cut costs and improve efficiency.”
At some point, that will hopefully result in safer flying. To Joe, it will also require a greater emphasis on safety culture. “It takes people talking about these things from the highest level of the Army to the lowest level,” he said. “Conversations that weren’t happening in the unit that I flew in.”
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