A two-year Government Accountability Office (GAO) performance audit found that helicopter operations at both the Army and Air National Guard suffered from a lack of pilot proficiency and experience due to limited flight hours and simulator time. Contributing factors included a lack of aircraft availability triggered by inadequate maintenance staffing and quality issues with refurbished aircraft, simulator scarcity, and pilots who are overburdened with administrative tasks. “What we looked at, I think, definitely has applicability to the commercial world,” said Cary Russell, GAO director of defense capabilities and management, at a recent webinar hosted by the Helicopter Association International.
The GAO investigated causal factors in 298 non-combat helicopter accidents between 2012 and 2021 that killed 28 across aircraft types including the Army Guard’s AH-64 Apache, UH/HH-60 Black Hawk, CH-47 Chinook, UH-72 Lakota, and Air National Guard’s HH-60G Pave Hawk. Of this fleet, the CH-47 had the highest accident rate while the AH-64 had the most fatal accidents.
According to the report, “Unit commanders and pilots consistently identified pilot inexperience—such as a lack of proficiency and experience with specific missions—among the factors that contributed to helicopter accidents. For example, one company commander stated that new pilots get almost no experience with multi-ship operations during training events.”
“The bottom line is that National Guard pilots are not flying enough to meet their training goals to become proficient pilots in general,” said Randy Neice, GAO senior defense analyst who was on the audit team. “National Guard officials noted that the minimum flying hours per month required for pilots to maintain skills is 6.77 hours. Most of the pilots are not meeting these goals. Ideally, the Army National Guard would like their pilots to exceed nine hours per month, which is the proficiency hour goal. None of the key airframes had pilots averaging over nine hours per month in 2019 and 2020.” Neice said that Army Guard officials indicated that the nine-hour average would not be achieved until at least fiscal 2026. “It’s going to continue to be a problem.”
Things are more or less the same at the Air National Guard, where the GAO found that the flying requirements for “basic mission” capability in the Pave Hawks were six hours per month, but that one-third of Air Guard units fell below that level between 2017 and 2021. None of the Air Guard units were meeting the goal of 12.5 pilot flying hours per month deemed required to be “combat ready.”
Neice stressed that these numbers were averages and that some units had pilots who flew frequently—as well as those who weren’t getting much flight time at all. The GAO did not compare the accident rate between full-time and part-time Guard pilots. The Army National Guard averages 200,000 flight hours per year across 1,300 aircraft, while the Air National Guard averages 3,500 hours annually across 18 aircraft.
Other factors the GAO identified included heavy reliance on part-time pilots; instructor, pilot, and aircrew shortages; and maintenance issues.
“There were major maintenance issues and availability challenges at most of the units. In general, [Army] National Guard units have 70 percent of the maintenance personnel they need,” said Neice.
Those units had the “additional challenge” of “dealing with refurbished aircraft that were of questionable quality.” Specifically, “Air National Guard officials told us that the helicopters they had required over 3,600 hours of unplanned maintenance” between 2019 and 2021, “resulting in the unit losing over 8,000 hours of aircraft availability” during that time, he said.
The GAO also found that, as a whole, part-time pilots had training challenges related to aircraft and simulator availability.
“These pilots are taking time off from work or reporting on weekends. If you are a part-time pilot and you’re only able to get there [to the base] once a week or a couple of times a month, and there’s an [aircraft] availability issue that affects what [training] you are trying to do, it really has a major effect on keeping those [flying] skills sharp,” Neice said, adding that access to simulators was also problematic.
While pilots who have a simulator on site averaged 32 hours of simulator training per year, Guard pilots who did not have an onsite sim averaged only 12 to 18 hours per year of simulator time.
Furthermore, pilots who need to squeeze all their simulator time into a weekend do not have the opportunity to spread that time out throughout the year, he said.
While the Guards are taking steps to address this problem, Neice said that the action to date “really hasn’t been comprehensive in nature.”
In addition to lack of experience and proficiency, the audit revealed cultural issues that drove accidents. In its report, the GAO found that “Army National Guard safety and aviation operations officials we interviewed told us that accidents are human factor-driven, largely caused by people not being disciplined in application of processes or regulations. Additionally, a unit safety official stated safety processes require enforcement from the unit. However, in analyzing the narratives, we found that ‘indiscipline’ was commonly mentioned when an accident investigation board suspected a culture within a unit existed where a crew regularly operated against regulations without consequences.”
The GAO also took issue with the Guard's risk-management practices and recommended that their helicopter units “continuously evaluate and update risk management worksheets and develop comprehensive strategies to address challenges that have hindered National Guard helicopter pilot training.”