A recent deadly collision over Washington, D.C. involving an Army helicopter has brought sudden national scrutiny to the service and its missions over the nation’s capital, but a master Army aviator told Breitbart News that they had been at risk for years.
In fact, the aviator said, the Army was so strapped for experienced pilots that up through 2023 it was sending its most junior pilots fresh out of flight school to fly these specialized missions. At one point, an estimated 40 percent of the pilots assigned to these missions, which can include evacuating leaders in the event of an attack, were on their first assignment, the aviator said.
“D.C. is some of the most challenging and restricted airspace in the country if not the world, so you can’t just send the most junior pilots there, which they don’t anymore. We said, ‘Enough is enough. We cannot take any more new pilots, because the people that we fly are the nation’s most senior leaders, and you need experienced pilots to deal with that and to deal in this airspace,’” the aviator, who wished to speak on background.
“I want to say 40 percent of the formation was first assignment. That’s — that’s huge. The problem with that is because of who we fly and the airspace. When you have these very junior groups, we got to get these people trained, get them out there so they can start flying missions,” the aviator said, adding that instructor pilots are flying their “butts off, trying to get these people just qualified and trained.”
“So a new person comes out of flight school, they’re basically qualified in the Black Hawk. Now you have to get them qualified in the unit’s mission. So in D.C., you got to get them familiar with all the helicopter routes, all the landing zones, the airspace, all the different places [they] go. That’s the structure,” the aviator said. “There’s a lot that goes into it. And so when you, when you have a W-1, or a lieutenant fresh out of flight school, they’re struggling just to keep the spinny side up, you know? And then now, now I’m throwing all this air and it’s challenging.”
The aviator said the directive to stop sending brand new pilots came around the summer of 2023 under Army Lt. Gen. Allan Pepin, who was then in command of Joint Task Force-National Capital Region and U.S. Army Military District of Washington. Pepin, who is commander of U.S. Army North Command, is an aviator himself.
“So he had a much better understanding. Right now it’s an infantryman, and before the aviator was an infantryman,” the aviator said. “We messaged that to the right people, and then we were able to get a hold of [Human Resources Command] and kind of have a handshake deal where no more — no more brand new pilots, just because of the airspace that we operate in.”
The aviator, who personally knew the Black Hawk crew members involved in the deadly January 29 collision, did not directly attribute it to the experience gap, but disagreed with news reports describing the crew was “highly experienced.” The instructor pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves, had just under 1,000 flying hours, but the co-pilot, who was doing her annual flight evaluation at the time, Captain Rebecca Lobach, had just under 500 flying hours.
“Five hundred hours is not bad for somebody at her years out of flight school. Honestly she’s probably slightly above average. We’re very junior right now,” the aviator said. “We don’t lack talent. We lack experience.”
“Andrew, with 1,000 hours, that’s above average as well. I would, again, I would definitely not call that crew a highly experienced crew in the big scheme of things. But for that unit, that’s an above average crew,” the aviator added. “That’s the horrible thing. We are just very junior. We have a major experience gap.”
The aviator pinpointed several reasons for the experience gap, beginning around 2014: less flying time with the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; sequestration cutting training time in the mid-2010s; airlines hiring military-trained pilots — including rotary; and the Biden administration’s COVID vaccine mandate for members of the military.
“Deployments are gone. So like back when I was a young W-2, W-3, we were going to Iraq and Afghanistan every other year, and you’re flying your butt off. … Deployments went away, so now it’s more difficult to get flight time.
“Airlines [are] hiring right now like crazy. So a lot of guys are jumping ship, because of the lifestyle that the airlines offer. And the pay is pretty substantial.
“Sequestration hurt bad. That hurt, really bad. We went from, you know, we went from flying three, four or 500 hours a year to flying 100, 250 hours a year.
“The vaccine … drove a lot of people out. That was huge. That destroyed not just aviation, but the military, and the trust between our senior leaders. … So that really broke the fabric between commander and subordinate, because they all kind of just lock step went along with it.
“The woke culture is real. Everything you hear — that’s all real. So all these things combined is why people are jumping ship.”
The aviator said it was hard to know exactly how many pilots chose to leave service instead of take the vaccine, which some feared would cause brain fog or slow reaction time.
“You would have to interview each person and say, ‘Why did you get out?’ So we don’t know if the vaccine did it, or if that was just kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back because of the lifestyle that the airlines offer. So we really don’t know.”
Also during the pandemic, flight instructors and student pilots were able to fly together, but instead of meeting up afterwards to discuss the flight, it was done remotely.
“They were doing the debriefs from their car via [Microsoft] Teams, and they were not allowed to sit down at the table with their instructor and do table talk and try to document like what they did, to try to improve. So I think that had huge, huge ramifications.”
The aviator said flight school standards have gone down just to push out more pilots, and that flying time has been cut in half compared to 20 years ago.
“How do you increase throughput on a shortage? You shorten the requirements to get people through flight school,” the aviator said. “When you cut your training almost in half, that significantly reduces the capabilities and the proficiency of a pilot coming out of flight school.”
The experience gap has been known for years.
A spate of Army helicopter crashes in fiscal year 2023 — which saw the highest death rate for soldiers since 2011 at 14 dead across 10 mishaps — prompted an Army aviation-wide standdown.
During the standdown, the Army found its pilots and aviation warrant officers are today significantly less experienced than they were during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Defense News reported last April.
The Army also determined that the top killer for aviators is “spatial disorientation,” which happens when a pilot wrongly perceives where the aircraft is relative to the ground or surroundings, the outlet reported.
“The accidents in 2023 and early 2024 all occurred in more challenging environments, where the chances of becoming spatially disoriented increased dramatically. These included flying at night using night vision goggles, flying in formation, and flying over snow and water,” according to the outlet.
Lobach at the time of the collision was wearing night goggles as part of her annual flight evaluation.
Army Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, former commander of the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence, which trains Army aviators, acknowledged the experience gap in an interview with Defense News last March.
“We’ve lost a lot of experience that was gained when we were doing the heel-to-toe rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan through natural retirement and attrition,” he said. “There is a known reduction in aviation warrant officer experience.”
Breitbart News on Thursday morning reached out to the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence for a comment on how the service was addressing the experience gap, and whether it planned to make any changes in light of the recent collision, but did not hear back by deadline.
Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on ”X”, Truth Social, or on Facebook.
The post Exclusive: Army Was Sending Junior Pilots Straight from Flight School to Fly Top DC Missions Until 2023 appeared first on Breitbart.
