Faulty Equipment, Lapsed Training, Repeated Warnings: How a Preventable Disaster Killed Six Marines

[WhiskeyGrinder]

A long, devastating read about the December 2018 crash.

https://www.propublica.org/article/marines-hornet-squadron-242-crash-pacific-resilard

ProPublica reviewed the safety report. It, like Schoolfield’s findings, details the flight crew’s missteps the night of the crash. But the safety investigation also paints a damning picture of high-level culpability and systemic dysfunction. It includes issues entirely unmentioned by the official report. In a startling compendium of failings, senior leaders make admissions about their own lapses and give alarming assessments about the state of Marine Corps forward-deployed forces.

The report said the leaders of the Marine Corps’ aviation units in the Pacific had created a dangerous culture in which safety issues were routinely brushed aside. In the unit’s day-to-day operations, raising safety concerns “is like the boy crying wolf.” “Risk is accepted with the mindset that this is ‘just the way things are’ or we ‘just make do with what we’ve got,’” it said.

Saying no to unsafe orders accomplishes little, the report found: “The lower echelon gets asked to find another way to mitigate the risk. The mindset becomes, ‘Higher HQ wants this to happen; therefore, we’ll find a way to make it happen.’”

That damning conclusion — front-line warning being thwarted by top-level commanders — echo the findings of ProPublica’s investigations into the 2017 tragedies involving the 7th Fleet’s two destroyers, the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John McCain. The destroyers were involved in fatal accidents months apart, and the Navy was quick to portray them as the result of negligence by sailors on the two ships. ProPublica’s reconstructions of the accidents, however, showed that uniformed and civilian Navy leaders at the highest levels had been alerted for years that the sailors and ships of the 7th Fleet were in crisis: undertrained, overtaxed and starved of the time and parts required to operate the country’s most versatile warships.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Bedtime kick. If this is happening in one small part of the military, what's happening across the

board?