Not Good Enough
Safety records are better, but the services struggle to achieve Rumsfeld’s accident reduction goals
By OTTO KREISHER, Special Correspondent
The Navy and the Marine Corps enjoyed relatively good safety records in fiscal year 2006, but they still lost 241 sailors and Marines and destroyed or damaged nearly $600 million in aircraft and other equipment in accidents.
Most of the material loss was from aviation mishaps, but most of the lives were lost in off-duty private motor vehicle accidents, said Rear Adm. George E. “Rico” Mayer, commander of the Naval Safety Center.
And despite lower mishap rates, the naval services fell well short of meeting the aggressive accident reduction goals set by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. It was the second year they missed the secretary’s goal, which required a 50 percent cut in mishaps relative to the 2002 numbers, when the services experienced a jump in accidents over prior-year figures.
Among the accident categories, which are essentially the same for both services, are: Aviation Class A Flight Mishaps, Afloat Class A Operational Mishaps, Shore Class A Operational Mishaps, Motor Vehicle Class A Operational Mishaps, as well as Private Motor Vehicle and Off-duty Shore and Recreational Fatalities.
A Class A mishap is one that causes a death, a permanent total disability or property damage of more than $1 million.
“We ended up last year meeting the 50 percent reduction goal in only one category in the Navy and in none in the Marine Corps,” Mayer said.
That one achievement was in operational motor vehicle fatalities, with two deaths in fiscal 2005, compared to three in 2002.
The two services “had significant improvements” in most of the safety categories for 2006, Mayer said, with the Navy below the previous five-year average in six of eight categories and the Marines in four of six.
The Army and the Air Force also failed to meet Rumsfeld’s reduction targets in fiscal 2005 and 2006, although they showed improvements in a number of areas. The Air Force had the safest year in its history with regard to Class A Aviation fatalities, losing just one airman in a flight incident.
Now the services will try to meet Rumsfeld’s latest goal: a 75 percent drop in mishaps from the 2002 numbers by the end of fiscal 2008.
The Marines had seven Class A aviation mishaps in fiscal 2006, down from nine in fiscal 2005 and below the 10-year average of 11.6.
But those seven accidents resulted in the deaths of 11 Marines and two Air Force personnel and the destruction of six aircraft. Ten of those deaths, including the two Air Force members, came in a Feb. 17 mid-air collision of two CH-53E helicopters over the Gulf of Aden.
The Navy had 14 Class A aviation mishaps, up from 13 in fiscal 2005, but below the 10-year average of 17.8 mishaps. Those accidents destroyed nine aircraft and killed 11 people.
Mayer tried to put things into perspective during a safety pitch at the annual “Tailhook” reunion Sept. 6 in Reno, Nev., by showing a chart depicting the enormous improvements in naval aviation safety over several decades.
In 1954, there were 776 aircraft destroyed and 55 Class A aviation mishaps per 100,000 flight hours. In fiscal 2006, the two services lost 20 aircraft and chalked up mishap rates of 1.55 per 100,000 flight hours for the Navy and 1.90 for the Marines.
Several former pilots told stories at Tailhook of “qualifying” to fly a new type of aircraft in the 1950s by reading a few pages of instructions and answering a short oral quiz.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that naval aviation adopted the replacement training squadrons to train fliers to operate new aircraft and a process that requires pilots and air crew members to study thick, detailed manuals on planes’ systems and to pass rigorous tests.
Other steps leading to the dramatic cut in aviation crashes were the addition of the angled flight deck on aircraft carriers — instead of the straight deck that meant a crash every time a pilot missed the arresting wires on landing — and establishment of the safety center.
The pressure for greater safety was increased by Rumsfeld’s 2003 challenge to cut all categories of mishaps by 50 percent.
“World-class organizations do not tolerate preventable accidents,” he said.
Rumsfeld renewed his challenge in a June 22 memo in which he noted that some organizations were “progressing toward their respective goals,” but “others are not.
“There is no excuse for losing lives given proper planning, attention to detail and the active involvement of the chain of command,” he said. “Accountability is essential to effective leadership. We simply will not accept status quo.”
This year the naval services are undertaking three steps to help reduce mishaps, Mayer said.
The first is to “re-invigorate” a concept the Navy calls “operational risk management” and the Marines call “total risk management,” Mayer said. It has existed for some time, but “has kind of lost some steam over the years.”
Despite the “operational” label, the concept applies equally to on-duty and off-duty activities, he said.
It requires an evaluation of the potential risk versus the possible gain of any activity, forcing a decision on whether it is worth doing or could be done safer.
The idea is to create a mindset so sailors and Marines can “make the right decision when faced with a hazard that was unexpected in the execution of a mission,” Mayer said.
The second effort addresses a problem the admiral called “the red threat versus the blue threat.
“We do a great job … in getting ready for and engaging the red threat, which is the enemy,” he explained. “But we suffer a lot of losses against the blue threat, which is ourselves.
“We need to make our folks understand that we are our own biggest threats, and that we must devote as much time, preparation and intensity in defeating the blue threat as we do with the red threat.”
The third effort is to provide “every sailor and Marine, particularly the under-25 male, which is our biggest risk group,” with a mentor “to look after them professionally and personally.”
The mentors will help ensure that the “high risk” individuals get the training they need to avoid dangerous activities, “so we can keep them alive,” Mayer said.
In aviation, the primary cause of accidents remains “human factors” or “flight crew errors,” he said. Even though the average age of naval aircraft is the highest ever, “the number of mishaps that are caused by mechanical failures are no different today than they have been in the past. It’s the human errors, decision-based errors, or lack of training … that are really getting us in trouble.”
But the No. 1 killer of young sailors and Marines continues to be off-duty private motor vehicle (PMV) accidents, which killed 115 sailors and Marines in fiscal 2005 and 166 in 2006.
The Marines have the highest rate of PMV fatalities, based on deaths per 1,000 personnel, followed by the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.
Although the military’s PMV death rate is comparable to the civilian population of a similar age, the services push aggressively to reduce their losses and have cut the fatalities during the “critical days of summer,” which usually show a jump in off-duty accidents, Mayer said.
The shore activities have been “doing pretty well,” in recent years, with the shipyards and other industrial facilities getting involved in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Voluntary Protection Program, which requires them to meet rigid safety standards, he said.
At Tailhook, Mayer insisted that it was not impossible to meet Rumsfeld’s mishap reduction goals. He showed a list of 61 Navy squadrons that in fiscal 2005 had no mishaps on duty or off duty.
“If these guys can have zero mishaps, maybe it’s not unobtainable,” he said.
