Marine Maj. Sterling Norton, 36, was killed when his F/A-18 Hornet crashed on July 28 during a live-fire nighttime training accident in Southern California.
Less than a week later, another F/A-18 from the same squadron crashed outside Naval Air Station Fallon, Nev. The pilot ejected safely – but it was the squadron’s third F/A-18 crash since October – two of which were fatal.
The Marine Corps, in response, conducted a one-day safety stand-down.
But such accidents are becoming more frequent – amid concerns that insufficient training and an aging fleet hobbled by a shortage of spare parts are contributing factors. A Fox News investigation reveals that, overall, the entire U.S. military saw a 48 percent increase in non-combat aviation crashes in 2014 and 2015 compared with the two prior years, based on press reports.
“They are going up partly because they are not getting the training they should get. They’re going up because maintenance is harder and harder to accomplish. They are going up because the airplanes are getting older and older,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, in an interview with Fox News.
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A huge percentage of the effort in developing flight simulators goes to modeling malfunctions. The point is to prepare the crews to deal with these situations, but making them more rare is naturally a more proactive approach.
Gotta address the fleet resources first. With more resources and better maintenance, these kinds of incidents will mostly go fown. Training for contigencies only lessens the impact and consequences of a mishap due to poor maintenance.
Nowadays the sim technology should be replacing more airplane hours with Sim hours because the devices are more capable. You can train nighttime missions with NOD's, formation flying and joint tactical exercises, weapons employment and tactics against threats, etc.