Army aviation was having a bad few years—even before Wednesday’s crash
The service’s fiscal 2024 mishap rate was the highest since 2007.
Meghann Myers | January 31, 2025
Army
The deadly Jan. 29 helicopter crash outside Washington, D.C., was the Army’s first serious aviation incident in months—but it came on the heels of a fiscal year that saw the service’s highest rate of serious crashes in over a decade.
Army aviation saw 17 class-A mishaps—that is, accidents that killed someone or caused more than $2.5 million in damage—during fiscal 2024, which ran from October 2023 through September. Thirteen of them have taken place since last January.
It’s “a year that Army Aviation looks back on in hopes of never repeating,” the Army Combat Readiness Center said in a damning annual assessment released just days before the mid-air collision near Reagan National Airport that killed 64 people on a jetliner and three soldiers in a UH-60 Black Hawk.
The accident has elevated to a national tragedy the type of training accidents that rarely make many headlines, at a time when Army aviation is trying to rebuild its safety culture.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/01/army-aviation-was-having-bad-few-yearseven-wednesdays-crash/402673/?oref=d1-homepage-top-story
