Badham Urges Grounding of Crash-Plagued Copter

Rep. Robert E. Badham on Friday accused Navy officials of ignoring an apparent design flaw in the military’s Super Stallion helicopter and called on the service to ground the entire the entire helicopter fleet until the safety problem is fixed.

Navy officials knew as early as 1976 that the Marine Corps’ accident-plagued, heavy-lift CH-53E and the Navy’s corresponding MH-53E may have been designed with a structural problem but did nothing to fix it, the Republican congressman said Friday at a press conference in his Newport Beach office.

Badham is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which is investigating a string of Super Stallion accidents and deaths. Investigators Tuesday uncovered internal Navy memos revealing that the helicopter’s maker, Sikorsky Aircraft Co., told the Navy more than a decade ago of the powerful helicopter’s problems, but the Navy authorized their use anyway, according to Badham.

The Super Stallion has been involved in at least 39 accidents and emergency landings since its inception, Badham said, and is responsible for at least 20 deaths.

“The Navy has not been fully open with Congress and the Marine Corps,” Badham said. “I was outraged when I heard that the Navy Department has not played fair.”

Badham said he did not “want to paint the whole Navy with the brush of lying and deceit until I get the facts. It could be just a few departments or officers. The Congress and Marine Corps were not given full and complete information.”

The congressman sent a letter Friday outlining his concerns to Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. asking that the worldwide fleet of 92 helicopters be grounded.

Lehman refused to comment Friday on Badham’s allegations. “The secretary has not had the opportunity to review Congressman Badham’s letter,” said Cmdr. Mark Neuhart, Lehman’s spokesman. “We will address the issues contained in the letter once we have the opportunity to review its contents.”

Sikorsky officials also refused to comment Friday. “I have seen the letter, but I haven’t seen the full (Armed Services Committee) report,” said Robert Stangarone, spokesman for Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford, Conn. “We are anxious to see the full report, and we plan to review it as soon as we have it in hand.”

The report, which the committee has worked on since last May, should be released in the next week or two, Badham said.

The Super Stallion, the largest helicopter made outside the Soviet Union, is capable of carrying 55 combat-equipped troops or lifting 16 tons of equipment and costs up to $24 million.

Six Fatal Crashes

But the three-engine aircraft has been plagued by problems since first being delivered to the Navy and Marines in 1980. Reports indicate that it has been involved in six fatal crashes that killed 24 Marines, and 17 Marines have have been injured in mishaps involving the Super Stallion.

Four of the crashes involved Marines stationed in Tustin, where about 45 of the helicopters are based. The latest fatal crash involving a Super Stallion occurred Jan. 8 near the Salton Sea Test Range in Imperial County. All five crew members were killed.

Badham said the helicopter was designed so that its heavy external load, airframe and main rotor all produce a vibration of nearly the same low frequency. Because the vibrations occur at about the same frequency, their effects during flight are multiplied dramatically.

This compounded vibration has caused “over-stress” of the helicopter’s critical moving parts on occasion and a visible twisting of the helicopter’s tail section, Badham said. Instead of trying to find out why this happens and fix the problem, the Navy instead has put “Band-Aids” on the problem, he said.

“They (the Navy) thought they fixed it by putting on filters and dampers,” Badham said, but the remedial efforts only caused the problems to be hidden from the pilots and flight control systems.

Although Badham said the datum currently is insufficient to prove the problem caused any of the crashes, there is a strong possibility that a link could be proved if a complete technical study were done.

As Early as 1976

“What I find particularly aggravating is that the Department of the Navy was informed of possible structural and dynamic component problems as early as 1976,” Badham said in his letter to Lehman. “And that in 1981, when the Navy Board of Inspection and Survey expressed the need for full technical testing of the (helicopter) prior to fleet use, the approval for service use came six days later.”

Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wisconsin), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, could not be reached for comment Friday. However, a committee spokesman said that the committee is “fully aware of what the issue is. Congressman Badham has kept Congressman Aspin fully informed, and the staff of the committee has been helping him on this all along.”

The worldwide Super Stallion fleet was temporarily grounded on Feb. 14 to allow mechanics to inspect the main gearbox assembly on one of the aircraft’s three big jet engines. A Marine spokesman said then that the grounding resulted from problems mechanics found when inspecting a CH-53E that made a forced landing on Oct. 21, 1986, in a Irvine strawberry field.

No one was injured in that incident in which, the Marines said, the aircraft experienced transmission failure. Badham said the gearbox inspection, which is not yet complete, involves a completely different problem than the vibration difficulty.

In addition to calling for the fleet to be grounded for investigation of the design flaw, Badham said Friday that he wants to have immediate congressional hearings on the Super Stallion’s problems. He also said he will ask Congress to suspend all funding for purchasing more of the controversial helicopters.

“We buy them at a rate of 12 a year,” he said, “and we’re still buying them.”