Super Stallion Helicopters Worn Out After Years Of War, Internal Military Report Concludes
February 23, 2016
The internal military report leads with a warning, typed in bold: If called to war tonight, the Marine Corps could only meet operational demands by deploying nearly every heavy-lift transport helicopter remaining in its inventory.
That would mean activating all aircraft that are down for long-term maintenance and three-quarters of those reserved for training new pilots.
One problem with that: The majority of these helicopters aren’t in condition to fly and would need weeks, maybe months, of work to get ready. Plus, the aviators who would pilot them into harm’s way would need time to train.
After more than a decade of relentless combat – a period marked by repeated deployments to the Middle East, ballooning procurement costs and cuts to defense spending – the Marine Corps’ workhorse helicopter, the CH-53E Super Stallion, is worn out and in need of serious attention.
That’s according to an independent study conducted on behalf of the Marine Corps last year. The report, the Super Stallion Independent Readiness Review, is classified “For Official Use Only” and has not been made public. Sources with access to the document have briefed The Virginian-Pilot and the Investigative Reporting Program on its detailed findings.
Among them:
• Not enough Super Stallions remain in service. The Marine Corps purchased more than 230 CH-53Es from Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. between the late 1970s and early ’90s, but after decades of flying and more than two dozen crashes,
only 146 remain, more than 50 below what’s needed.
• “Operational commanders challenged with this astonishingly depleted inventory are further hamstrung by unacceptably poor readiness.” Because of parts shortages, maintenance backlogs and years of wear, only 23 percent of remaining Super Stallions were ready to fly this time last year, far below the military’s standard 75 percent readiness requirement.
• “Aircraft were not properly reset during and after the war.” The Marine Corps, according to the report, spent only about $100,000 per aircraft to restore its Super Stallions after the Afghanistan drawdown. The service hired temporary contractors who spent about a month on tune-ups for each helicopter. The Army, in contrast, has spent about $1.2 million restoring each of its transport helicopters, investing more than 100 days of work and 6,000 man hours per aircraft.
•
With so few functioning Super Stallions, pilots and aircrew aren’t flying enough to stay proficient. “Poor CH-53E availability is costing the Marine Corps an entire generation of aircrew and contributing to the destruction of community morale. … Anecdotes are rampant of pilots returning from six-month deployments with only 30 total flight hours and pilots completing their first operational tours with too few hours to become aircraft commanders.”
Armed with the report, the Marine Corps announced sweeping plans last month to overhaul its Super Stallion fleet as part of its annual aviation plan. The goal is to return each helicopter to “full-mission-capable status” over the next three years and give squadrons resources needed to maintain them.
“I’m not happy at all where we are with the (Super Stallion) right now, but I do believe we have a recovery strategy that will work,” said Lt. Gen. Jon M. Davis, the Marine Corps deputy commandant for aviation, in an interview with The Pilot. “I’m proud of what we’re doing to fix this, but I’m not proud of where we’re at right now. The taxpayers should be unhappy.”
The Super Stallion is the Marines’ primary option for moving troops and cargo on land and at sea, where it operates aboard amphibious Navy ships. It remains in high demand more than 35 years after entering service, but the Cold War-era aircraft hasn’t received the resources needed to keep it operating at a high level.
Davis ordered the Super Stallion review a year ago, part of a broader effort to improve combat readiness after more than a decade of fighting. Similar studies have been conducted or are ongoing for other Marine Corps aircraft, including the MV-22 Osprey and AV-8B Harrier.
Many of the Super Stallion’s problems can be traced to the decision not to do a full reset after years of fighting in Afghanistan, Davis said.
“We were trying to get maximum readiness at the time, and the best way to do that was to do it in theater (in Afghanistan),” Davis said. “Frankly, we needed to do what the Army did. That would have given us less aircraft to fly then, but we’d have more aircraft to fly now. … We made a mistake. But now we’re recovering from that.”
Of more than $650 million budgeted to reset Marine Corps programs, about half is being spent on the Super Stallion fleet, Davis said. That work has already begun.
The Super Stallion reset comes during a period of increased scrutiny for the aging helicopter and the Navy’s MH-53E Sea Dragon, a nearly identical variant used primarily for minesweeping.
The Super Stallions and Sea Dragons must remain in service years longer than planned because of delays in developing replacements. Each has dealt with poor readiness and above-average crash rates in recent years, grabbing headlines and spurring brass to reinvest in the programs.
Many of the helicopters were grounded for months last year while crews made thousands of repairs to potentially unsafe wires and fuel lines, a problem that came to light after a Sea Dragon caught fire and crashed off the coast of Virginia Beach two years ago, killing three sailors. More than a year after that mishap, The Pilot and IRP reported in an exclusive story that the Marine Corps and Navy had failed to adequately address the safety hazard.
Davis said he first learned of the lingering safety issue last year from The Pilot story and “had a small meltdown.” He temporarily grounded the fleet and called for the most comprehensive one-time inspection and repair process in the helicopter program’s history.
“A lot of people thought that was overkill,” Davis said. “I wanted to make sure we had safe airplanes.”
As a result, Super Stallions spent only about 21,500 hours in the air in 2015, down from a total of more than 32,000 hours a couple of years ago. It was the fewest flight hours logged by the aircraft in any year since 1988, when the military was still buying new Super Stallions.
The poor state of the Super Stallions has occasionally put a strain on other Marine Corps aircraft: A CH-53E squadron couldn’t deploy to Nepal in April, leaving earthquake relief efforts to helicopters with smaller payloads, including a UH-1Y Huey that crashed in the Himalayas, killing six Marines and five Nepali civilians.
The Super Stallion’s problems are a symptom of a systemic issue plaguing the military, said Todd Harrison, director of budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Delays and cost overruns for new weapons systems – including the CH-53K, which initially was expected to begin replacing the Super Stallion last year but won’t be ready until at least 2019 – are putting a strain on the upkeep of existing assets, Harrison said.
“This is becoming more common across the services,” he said. “It’s a balancing act between dealing with the needs of today and the needs of the future, and in a zero-sum budget environment, there’s no easy answer.”
The danger, Harrison said, comes when service leaders try to squeeze more years out of existing aircraft without giving them proper resources or lowering readiness expectations.
“That’s the kind of situation that would give a commander incentive to take unnecessary risk,” Harrison said. “That’s an incentive for disaster.”
Safety is not covered in the internal Super Stallion readiness review, though it’s widely accepted among military aviation experts that a decline in flight hours can degrade pilot skills and make flying more dangerous.
Retired Navy Cmdr. Chris Harmer, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said the link between flight hours and safety is indisputable.
“Absolutely,” Harmer said. “A pilot who gets 10 hours of flight time a month is more likely to be involved in a pilot-induced error than a pilot who gets 30 flight hours a month.”
The Super Stallion has seen a spike in crashes in recent years, even as it flies less. The result is a rate of 7.9 crashes for every 100,000 flight hours since 2013, nearly four times higher than the Super Stallion’s historical average.
In September, a Marine from Hampton Roads was killed, and 11 others were injured when their Super Stallion experienced a “hard landing” during a fast-rope training exercise at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
Four months later, in January, two Super Stallions crashed into the ocean off the coast of Hawaii, killing a dozen Marines.
The causes of both mishaps are under investigation.
A few days before the Hawaii crash, that squadron’s commanding officer was relieved of duty because of “a loss of confidence in his ability to continue to lead,” a Marine Corps spokesman told The Pilot.
A Marine official familiar with Lt. Col. Edward Pavelka’s removal told the Marine Corps Times that the commander was “not able to maintain material readiness standards … for optimal use of manpower, material, facilities and funding.”
Another source familiar with the squadron’s troubles told the newspaper that “they were not flying enough” in the months before the mishap – flight hours were “way, way low.”
Davis, the general, said he was familiar with the squadron’s struggles and supported the decision to dismiss the commander.
None of his squadron commanders “have all the resources they need to do all that I’m asking of them,” Davis said, “but that one was even lower than the others. That one stuck out as an underperforming unit.”
The string of mishaps, combined with reports of historically poor material readiness and limited flight hours, is frustrating some Super Stallion pilots, aircrews and maintainers.
Anne Scott, a former Marine captain and Super Stallion pilot who left the service in 2014 and knew crew members killed in Hawaii, summarized the prevailing sentiment among friends who are still serving:
“It’s just unacceptable at this point,” Scott said. “They expect Marines to put their lives on the line without supporting us. They demand flight hours, but the helicopters are in terrible shape, and our maintainers haven’t been given the support they need to do the job.”
Davis said the service is taking steps to get the fleet back to readiness, and he expects morale will follow.
“I understand how they feel,” Davis said. “These guys joined the Marine Corps to fly and serve their nation. … We need to do better for them.”
In addition to resetting each aircraft, the service is paying a contractor $6.6 million to restore two retired Sea Dragons that have spent the past decade in storage at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, also known as the “aircraft boneyard.” The helicopters will be converted for use as Super Stallions and used by a Marine training squadron, freeing two aircraft to rejoin an operational squadron, officials said.
Also, Davis said, the service is spending millions of dollars on tools and equipment. Over the years, Super Stallion squadrons have had to deal with a shortage of equipment and parts needed to perform standard maintenance, further hindering an already strained fleet.
The Super Stallions should be fully restored by 2019, Davis said.
The helicopters will be needed for at least a decade after that.
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The ‘Boneyard’ at Davis-Monthan Airbase in Tucson, Arizona- photo by Tech. Sgt. Bennie J. Davis III/Air Force
The WASP, an Amphibious Assault Ship (Photo by Cpl John Hamilton, USMC)
Marines from the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines train on the WASP (Photo by Cpl.Ryan Coleman, USMC)
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