Tells of Long History of Problems With Craft : Marine Killed in Copter Crash Leaves Chilling Tape

A helicopter mechanic killed in the crash of a Marine Corps Super Stallion last week left behind a chilling tape recording in which he complained of a long history of mechanical problems with the aircraft that had left pilots and mechanics on edge.

“It’s getting worse,” Sgt. Dulles Arnette told an attorney’s investigators after the June, 1984, crash of a CH-53E Super Stallion near San Clemente Island that killed four Marines. “Everyone’s really edgy, everyone’s looking at things they didn’t look at before . . . and we’ve come across other things that have been wrong.”

Arnette, 25, a Super Stallion maintenance crew chief at the Marine Corps’ Tustin base, said defective parts, faulty construction and mechanical breakdowns had long plagued the military’s largest and most powerful helicopter--problems that became increasingly apparent as the number of Super Stallion crashes mounted.

On Friday, Arnette and three other Marines died in the crash of a Super Stallion making a landing approach at the Marine Corps’ combat training center at Twentynine Palms, the sixth major crash of a CH-53E in two years.

A total of 66 servicemen have died in the CH-53E or its smaller predecessors, the CH-53A and CH-53D Sea Stallions, since 1984. There are 59 of the massive troop and equipment helicopters still in service, including the “Marine One” fleet of presidential helicopters.

‘Kind of Eerie’

“It’s kind of an eerie tape. It’s like he’s predicting his own death,” said Gene Buhler, investigator for Santa Ana attorney Mark Robinson Jr., who is representing the wives of two of those killed in the 1984 crash in a lawsuit against Sikorsky Aircraft Co. of Stratford, Conn., manufacturer of the Super Stallion.

“He was trying to do something,” Robinson said. “He was trying to give us information to help us do something about it. He was concerned. He was trying to help--maybe himself.”

Marine Corps officials said Tuesday that the investigation of the most recent crash has ruled out any malfunction in the tail rotor or tail rotor drive, frequent factors in Super Stallion crashes.

U.S. Rep. Robert Badham (R-Newport Beach), who is seeking a full investigation into the safety of the CH-53E--said the Marines have assured him that pilot error was the most likely cause of the accident. “There’s nothing in the wreckage to indicate anything mechanical went wrong,” he said.

Concerns Expressed

But Arnette, speaking on a tape that had been gathering dust in Robinson’s law offices, said mechanics who worked on the Super Stallion were not only concerned about mechanical problems, they were concerned that the Marine Corps and Sikorsky knew about problems and weren’t telling the flight crews.

“We’ve had problems. There’s no doubt about it. We’ve had problems. Everybody knows about them. Sikorsky knows about them,” he said.

Sikorsky has referred all questions on the Sea Stallion to the Marine Corps, and Marine Corps officials at El Toro, which supervises operations at Twentynine Palms and Tustin, said they would have no comment on the tape-recording until they have reviewed it.

But in a prepared statement Tuesday, Maj. Anthony Rothfork of Marine Corps headquarters in Washington noted that since tail rotor drive modifications were completed in September of last year, the CH-53E had flown more than 6,000 hours without mishap.

“When compared to other helicopters in their first five years of operational service, the CH-53E has been involved in about half as many mishaps for comparable hours flown,” Rothfork said.