WASHINGTON, 4 April 2003 — Although an army helicopter was shot down Wednesday, Saddam Hussein’s air defenses overall have posed little threat to US and British air power during the first two weeks of the war against Iraq. Far more consequential have been accidents. At least 17 allied aircraft have been lost, killing 24 servicemen, and injuring several others. Two pilots have been captured by enemy 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 one-tenth of 1 percent, said Daniel Goure, an authority on military affairs and the 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 morning, 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 Gulf while attempting to land on the US amphibious ship Nassau during a training mission, and a Navy S-3B Viking veered off the deck of the US carrier Constellation shortly after landing. The pilots ejected safely in both incidents. Other than a Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack jet that was unintentionally destroyed by an American Patriot missile on March 23, those were the first airplanes in accidents. But an array of US 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 Gulf, killing the six British and one American crewmen on board.
Other helicopter accidents have destroyed AH-64 Apache Longbows, OH-58 Kiowas, a UH-1 Huey, a MH-53 Pave Low and a UH-60 Blackhawk, according to news reports. In some instances, US 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 established poor safety records over the years.
