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16 <a href="http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette">www.mca-marines.org/gazette</a> M a r i n e C o r p s G a z e t t e • M a y 2 0 0 9 IDEAS & ISSUES (AVIATION) tors. Our community in general is re- sistant to others peering into our busi- ness. MFOQA is perceived as “big brother,” a tool to be used by leader- ship to ferret out and punish aviators. Some naval aviators feel that leadership should only interest itself in mission ac- complishment, not how the mission is accomplished. This feeling is nothing new though. After World War II, when the Army Air Corps was making signif- icant strides in reducing its mishap rate, the Navy was reluctant to take safety initiatives seriously. Safety initia- tives were seen as a tax that robbed time, assets, and money from accom- plishing the mission. The thought was that naval aviation by its very nature was inherently more dangerous, thus mishap rates would be higher. Our mishap rate, which was an astonishing 83.3 per 100,000 flight hours in 1945,3 was completely unaffordable from the standpoint of assets and lives lost. As previously evidenced, over the next several decades the Navy accepted and implemented numerous safety ini- tiatives, drastically reducing its mishap rate. Today we need to more effectively use available data to be able to signifi- cantly reduce our mishap rate. Once the cultural aversion to having flight data collected and analyzed is over- come we will see, like we did in the 1950s and 1960s, a significant reduc- tion in accidents. As we gain a greater understanding of the causal factors that drive these accidents we will develop new intervention strategies to avoid and mitigate them. As naval aviators we tend to forget that, although we sign for the aircraft when we step out of maintenance control for our flight, the plane is bought and paid for by the taxpayer and entrusted to us by our leadership. Both may rightly take a keen interest in what we do with their asset while we are using it. Despite what appears to be a rela- tively flat trend in the mishap rate over the past two decades, which is certainly better than an increasing one, we can- not accept “business as usual.” We must still find and use new tools and new paradigms to significantly reduce the mishap rate because we can’t afford business as usual. Thirty years ago the average cost of a Class A flight mishap was less than $5 million. Today, as de- picted in Figure 3, that cost is five to six times higher. Very expensive new platforms like the EF–18G, F–35, MV–22, and P–8 are coming to the fleet. A mishap in one of these is not going to make this cost curve go down. My father used to boast that back in 1959 he flew the Marine Corps’ first operational supersonic jet and the first tactical aircraft costing more than $1 million. That’s a mere $7 million in today’s dollars after adjusting for infla- tion. At roughly $83 million each, crashing one F/A–18 Super Hornet today has the equivalent cost impact of crashing 11 to 12 F8U Crusaders back then. We’re also producing smaller numbers of aircraft today, thus the loss of just one aircraft has proportionally greater impacts on our warfighting ca- pabilities. Since the first F/A–18 flew in 1978 we have crashed eight Crashing one F/18 today is the cost equivalent of crashing a dozen 1960s-era aircraft. (Photo by LCpl Melissa Tugwell.)
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