Another Navy F-14 Crashes, Increasing Safety Concerns

A Navy F-14 fighter jet crashed and exploded in Virginia on Wednesday, heightening concern about the safety of the aging aircraft that has crashed four times in the last three months.

Although Navy officials have said that the crash rate of the F-14 is not significantly worse than other carrier-based combat aircraft, safety experts are growing increasingly worried that the accidents could hamper the Navy’s ability to perform its missions.

The Navy already has been forced to restrict the speed and use of engine afterburners on the F-14, actions that experts say could jeopardize confidence in the aircraft.

The F-14 is among the oldest of the Pentagon’s tactical combat jets, designed in the 1960s with now-dated swing-wing technology.

A series of failures in developing new aircraft in the 1980s has left the Navy lagging in its plan to modernize its fleet.

In Wednesday’s accident, an F-14B was attempting to make a landing at Oceana Naval Air Station in southern Virginia and went down about 11:30 a.m. in a wooded area just short of the runway.

The pilot and the radar intercept officer, neither of whom the Navy identified, ejected safely.

In the prior accidents, seven Navy officers and civilians on the ground were killed.

The crash came just one day after Navy and Marine officials testified before Congress that they had delayed safety upgrades to their fleets because there is not sufficient funding.

As a result of the spate of recent F-14 crashes, the Navy has been forced to restrict the aircraft to just 550 knots maximum speed, far less than half its maximum design speed.

Phillip Kolczynski, an Orange County attorney who specializes in civilian and military aviation litigation, said that such restrictions could undermine confidence in the F-14 if the Navy does not find answers to what is causing the crashes.

The rapid pace of the accidents over the past three months is already judged serious enough by Navy officials that they cannot simply be ignored, he added.

In the aftermath of the latest crash, the Pentagon’s decision to forgo safety upgrades to the F-14 was seized upon by Republican lawmakers Wednesday as an example of the impact of the Clinton administration’s defense cutbacks.

On Tuesday, Adm. Jay L. Johnson, vice chief of naval operations, testified in Congress that the Navy did not have money for new engines for the F-14A, an early model of the aircraft that has had a history of engine problems.

At the same hearing, before the House National Security Committee’s procurement subcommittee, Johnson said the Navy has found that the cause of an F-14A crash off the coast of California earlier this year was a malfunction of the plane’s afterburner.

Of the other two accidents this year before Wednesday’s crash, the Navy believes pilot error was the reason.

An accident that occurred Jan. 29 in Nashville was blamed on a pilot attempting to show off in front of his parents by taking off in a sharply vertical path.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), chairman of the House subcommittee, said Wednesday in an interview that he would make sure funding is available to upgrade the F-14 cockpit to a digital electronics system.