The Army will have its helicopter pilots conduct hours of additional training after a rash of a dozen crashes that has killed 10 service members just since October.
“We've seen a troubling trend with our accident rates, and certainly any loss of life is 100% unacceptable,” Maj. Gen. Walter Rugen, director of Army aviation, told reporters in a brief press conference Wednesday. “And then obviously, even when we have accidents that we lose the aircraft or severely damage the aircraft, we consider that unacceptable, too.”
The Army has seen a troubling trend of helicopter crashes, particularly among Apache and Black Hawk helicopters. Last year, the service saw 10 incidents and 14 fatalities.
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Now, the service is adding four to six hours worth of training for pilots that focuses on spatial awareness and maintenance issues, though the service was unclear on what that training means in practice.
The move comes after Army aircraft have been grounded twice in the past year — including once after a crash last April involving two Black Hawks out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that killed nine soldiers in one of the deadliest training incidents in the service's history.
The Army National Guard also grounded its aircraft in late February after two of its pilots died in an AH-60 Apache crash in Mississippi. In a prior incident Feb. 12, a National Guard…
