THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 6, 1996 TAG: 9602060272
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
Notwithstanding last week's fatal F-14 crash near Nashville, Tenn., military flying and naval aviation in particular are safer than ever, a congressional watchdog agency reported Monday.
The General Accounting Office said serious accident rates for all the services have declined substantially during the past 20 years, with the most impressive improvement shown by the Navy and Marine Corps. The sea services recorded 7.3 mishaps per 100,000 hours flown in 1975 but only 2.2 accidents per 100,000 hours in 1995.
Still, naval aviation remains more dangerous than flying by either the Army or Air Force, the GAO concluded. The mishap rate for all military aircraft last year was only 1.5 per 100,000 hours flown. The figures do not include planes downed during hostilities.
Not surprisingly, all military flying appears more hazardous than commercial aviation. Commercial flights last year recorded an accident rate of less than 0.02 per 100,000 hours flown, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Some 168 people were killed in commercial aircraft accidents, however, compared to just 85 who died in military crashes.
Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., who asked for the study, said Navy flying is inherently more dangerous than that done by the other services because it involves takeoffs and landings from aircraft carriers and other ships.
Navy flying also is more hazardous than that of the Air Force in particular, said GAO analyst Mark E. Gebicke, because Navy fliers do more takeoffs and landings per hour flown than do their Air Force counterparts. Most aircraft accidents are associated with takeoffs or landings.
Skelton, a senior member of the House National Security Committee, asked for the study last year after a rash of military air crashes produced 18 deaths in less than five weeks. He said he was surprised to find that the rate of crashes actually has been declining fairly steadily since the mid-1970s.
``There is room for improvement,'' Skelton said, however. ``One crash is too many. One death is too many.'' Human error, whether by pilots, controllers or maintenance crews, was a factor in 73 percent of military crashes during 1994 and '95, the GAO found.
Skelton said the military's handling of accident investigations has helped lower the mishap rate, but he called for several reforms to ensure that those investigations are unbiased.
In particular, Skelton said he will push legislation to require that the investigation board created after each mishap draw a majority of its members from outside the chain of command of anyone involved in the accident.
All the services now constitute such boards so that a majority comes from inside the chain of command involved. ``This creates, at a minimum, the appearance that investigations are not completely independent,'' Skelton said.
Skelton said he also wants each service's safety center to have a voting member on the investigation board of any accident involving that service's planes. The Army and Air Force already give their safety centers at least one vote on such boards, but the Navy permits only a non-voting observer.
A Navy official suggested that because the Naval Safety Center is the final judge of all Navy accident investigations, service leaders believe it doesn't need a vote on each investigation board.
The official said each Navy investigation board is headed by someone from outside the chain of command involved in the mishap. But because service leaders believe that ``no one . . . is going to know the pilots better than the people in their squadron,'' a majority of the board's members come from inside the chain, the official added. ILLUSTRATION: MISHAP RATES
VP Graphic
[For a copy of the graphic, see microfilm for this date.]
SOURCE: Department of Defense
KEYWORDS: ACCIDENTS PLANES ACCIDENTS MILITARY STUDY by CNB