Navy Suspends Operations to Review Safety

The Navy, responding to an eerie succession of accidents, halted the normal operation of all its ships, aircraft and shore-based units Tuesday to launch an unprecedented three-day review of the service’s safety procedures.

Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Carlisle A. H. Trost ordered the service-wide “safety stand-down” hours after an electrical fire aboard the Navy helicopter carrier Inchon injured 31 people. The ship was in a Norfolk, Va., shipyard for routine repairs.

Within hours of the safety message, an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, conducting routine air combat training out of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, went down in the Atlantic Ocean 60 miles northwest of Key West, Fla. The two-man crew was plucked from the water by a Navy helicopter, but the aircraft was lost.

Tuesday’s order follows a string of at least 10 significant accidents involving Navy forces that have occurred since October, including a plane crashing into an apartment complex, a jet dropping a bomb on a cruiser and last weekend’s accidental bombing of a California campsite.

The Navy has suffered 102 fatalities in accidents so far this year. It considers all the incidents unrelated.

Under the new order, all Navy units will suspend their normal flying and sailing schedules for two days, beginning sometime in the next three days. The interruption in routine training is designed to focus sailors’ attention on the perils they face and to review and revise the safety measures that are in place to minimize those dangers.

“The obligation we have to bring every sailor home safely and husband the scarce resource of combat readiness dictates a hard look at all levels and at every detail,” Trost wrote in his message to the fleet.

Trost ordered skippers, squadron leaders and base commanders to “leave no stone unturned to ensure that safety of operations is foremost in the minds of all hands, from the deck plate to the bridge.”

At the end of the 72-hour period, Trost is to receive reports detailing the lessons learned during the safety reviews.

“There is no common thread” to the recent string of mishaps, Trost told reporters. But he acknowledged that “we’ve had this recent rash of accidents, which makes me say: ‘Is something happening; are people getting careless?’ ”

The Navy fatalities this year include 47 sailors killed aboard the battleship Iowa on April 19 when the turret of a 16-inch gun exploded. In 1988, a total of 63 fatalities occurred during Navy operations and training, Navy spokesman Lt. Frank Thorp said.

This year so far, 67 major accidents have occurred aboard ships, submarines and in aircraft. Thorp noted that the total is still below the Navy’s record low of 69 major accidents last year.

One former Navy officer warned that the recent string of accidents may be a consequence of the Navy’s long-term budget strategy, which has emphasized shipbuilding and equipment modernization while giving lower priority to personnel and training budgets. As the size of the fleet has grown, increases in manpower and training budgets have not kept up, said retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, deputy director of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information.

As a result, sailors must work harder and under tight budgets to man a much larger fleet, Carroll said. As those pressures increase, he said, accidents can happen more readily.

“These accidents might be tied together by the fact that you are pushing people too hard for too long and not putting equivalent increases into the readiness effort,” Carroll said. “This might be the forward edge of a trend” that could continue as budget reductions cut deeply into personnel and readiness spending.

The safety review comes as the military services brace for deep budget cuts likely to be ordered by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction law.

Because of an arcane loophole in that law, the Navy’s “operations and maintenance” budget, which pays for steaming and flying hours, would not be cut. But Adm. Leon A. Edney, vice chief of naval operations, said last week that the law would force the Navy to cut 76,500 active-duty sailors from its rolls and reduce its reserve forces by 6,500.

Among the string of accidents since October:

--A jet accidentally dropped bombs outside a practice bombing range in California over the weekend, but no one was injured.

--A reserve attack jet last Thursday crashed into an apartment complex in Atlanta, killing two people.

--On Sunday, the U.S. destroyer Kinkaid collided with a merchant ship in the Strait of Malacca off the coast of Malaysia. One sailor died and four were injured on the Kinkaid.

--A Navy F/A-18 fighter jet from the aircraft carrier Midway on Oct. 30 dropped a 500-pound bomb on the guided-missile cruiser Reeves in the Indian Ocean, blowing a 5-foot hole in the ship’s bow and injuring five sailors.

--On Oct. 29, a jet trainer crashed on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Lexington in the Gulf of Mexico. Five people, including the pilot, died and 19 were injured.

--Four sailors have been swept overboard in recent weeks, three from the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Atlantic and one from the carrier Carl Vinson in the Pacific. Two were rescued, but one was missing in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific, presumably drowned.

The grounding and review can begin as early as today.

At Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, aircraft will be grounded starting at 7 a.m. Thursday for 48 hours. The airfield, which normally roars with 350 takeoffs each day, will be silent as pilots and maintenance crews view safety tapes and review their operations.

Miramar usually has 8-hour safety reviews four times a year, said Chief Bobbie Carleton, Miramar spokeswoman.

“The most obvious thing, because this is a longer period of time, this is going to be much more intense and will involve the officers, enlisted personnel, civilians and families,” Carleton said.

A number of ships began implementing the safety stand-down hours after orders were received Tuesday, said Cmdr. David Dillon, a Pacific Fleet spokesman. For the ships stationed in San Diego, commanding officers are being told that they can take more than the required 48 hours to review safety procedures, he said.

“Let’s hit safety hard because we’ve had so many things happen in the last three weeks,” Dillon said. “We’re adopting a look-before-you-leap approach.”

Part of the goal will be heightening sailors’ attention to details, said Capt. Charlie Robinson, a safety officer for Naval Air Force Pacific Fleet. “When you look at each individual mishap, it’s obviously come from inattention. Let’s get everybody’s attention.”

The safety reviews will affect only those Marines who are stationed aboard Navy ships, said Lt. Patrick Gibbons, spokesman for Camp Pendleton. There are now about 1,500 Marines aboard ships in the Western Pacific, plus Marine detachments on aircraft carriers, submarines and battleships.

A number of Navy personnel expressed dismay over the recent chain of accidents.

“When you hear about these accidents, you realize it could happen to you. This brings it home,” said Petty Officer Brian Bell, an aircraft technician. “You just hope you don’t make a mistake yourself. But it’s a busy place; you have to be careful, and you hope that everyone is paying attention.”

Concerned that the string of recent accidents may have hurt recruiting, officials recently called about 75 recruiters in the Western portion of the nation, said Lt. Gene Eliott, a spokesman for Navy Recruiting Area 8, a 10-state area that includes California. None of the recruiters reported receiving calls from concerned applicants or their parents. Eliott said he did not expect to see a decline, but added, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Healy reported from Washington and Zamichow from San Diego.