Accidents Chief Foe for Allied Aircraft

Although two U.S. aircraft were shot down Wednesday, Saddam Hussein’s air defenses overall have posed less threat than accidents have to U.S. and British air power during the first two weeks of the war against Iraq.

At least 17 allied aircraft have been lost in accidents, killing 24 servicemen and injuring several others. Two of the pilots have been captured by Iraqi forces.

Several defense analysts nevertheless characterized the accident numbers as impressively low.

“In the context of 20,000 sorties,” the losses amount to less than 0.1%, said Daniel Goure, an authority on military affairs and vice president of the Lexington Institute, a think tank in the Washington area. “And there’s not a pattern here. It’s not like you’re losing one particular type of aircraft.”

In the most recent accident, a Navy F-14 Tomcat crashed in the Iraqi desert early Wednesday, apparently after an engine failure forced the two crew members to eject and then await rescue by a search helicopter.

On Tuesday, a Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier crashed into the Persian Gulf while attempting to land on the U.S. amphibious ship Nassau during a training mission, and a Navy S-3B Viking veered off the deck of the U.S. carrier Constellation shortly after landing.

The pilots ejected safely in both incidents.

Other than a Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack jet that was mistakenly destroyed by an American Patriot missile March 23, those were the first airplanes involved in accidents. But an array of U.S. and British helicopters have crashed, some of them with fatalities.

On March 21, a Marine Corps CH-46E Sea Knight crashed while flying through heavy wind and a sandstorm in northern Kuwait, killing eight British Marines and four American Marines, the first fatalities of the war.

The next day, two Royal Navy Sea King helicopters collided over the Persian Gulf, killing the one American and six British crewmen on board.

Other helicopter accidents have destroyed AH-64 Apache Longbows, OH-58 Kiowas, a UH-1 Huey, an MH-53 Pave Low and a UH-60 Black Hawk, according to news reports.

In some instances, U.S. fighter planes have then swooped in to destroy the remains before they could be confiscated by enemy troops.

The crashes clearly serve as reminders of the hazards of military aviation, particularly when pilots must fly large numbers of missions under difficult conditions and in aging aircraft, some of which have poor safety records.

The three jet accidents this week all involved Navy and Marine Corps planes, which tend to have higher accident rates than Air Force aircraft, in part because they face the challenge of operating off ships. The Air Force has not lost any planes.

Though it is likely to take months to investigate the causes of the accidents, some military aviation experts say the findings are likely to reinforce the need to modernize the U.S. aviation fleet.

“The first thing it means is that some of these things are getting old, especially the helicopters,” said Philip E. Coyle, the Pentagon’s chief of weapons testing and evaluation in the Clinton administration. “The other thing it tells you is that the first thing to get cut when there are budget pressures is logistics support and spare parts. These are complicated pieces of machinery, and if they can’t keep them in absolutely superb shape, they’re going to have mechanical and electronic failures.”

Noting that most of the accidents involved helicopters, Richard Aboulafia, a Fairfax, Va.-based aircraft analyst, said that “vertical flying is a miserable way to fly. The law of gravity makes that inherently less safe.”

The Harrier, which shares a helicopter’s ability to lift off and land vertically, has been the military’s most dangerous plane since it was introduced in 1971, based on the standard of accidents per 100,000 flight hours.

The downing of an Army helicopter and a Navy F/A-18C Hornet jet Wednesday night are the first confirmed instances of allied aircraft crashing as a result of enemy fire, although Iraqi officials said small arms were responsible for the March 24 crash of an Apache Longbow that led to the capture of two Americans.

In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which lasted six weeks, 27 U.S. airplanes and 11 planes flown by allied nations were destroyed by Iraqi missiles, antiaircraft fire and other causes.

Even in that conflict, however, aircraft loss rates were relatively low.

“Based on the sortie rate, we lost fewer airplanes to enemy action than we would have lost during normal training,” said retired Gen. Charles A. Horner, the U.S. air commander in the Gulf War. “I attribute that to the fact that when somebody else is trying to kill you, you pay more attention.”

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Times researcher Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this report.