Four engines and eleven crewmen, including two pilots and a flight engineer. Mix in a little not enough runway to taste:
The U.S. military says that a U.S. Navy patrol plane overshot the runway at an airfield in Afghanistan and was destroyed.
A crew member broke an ankle, but the rest of the crew survived the Tuesday crash. The military’s statement does not give further details on who was onboard the aircraft.
The statement says a Navy P-3 Orion airplane sustained “serious structural and fire damage” at Bagram Airfield, the main U.S. military base north of Kabul.
The military says it is investigating the accident.
I bet.
We’re flying the hell out of aging aircraft, with many of the fleet already on the bench for rework and others rapidly approaching their end of useful life. The more aircraft we break, the higher the load on the ones left behind, the faster we run out of irreplaceable assets.
It’s a damned shame.
Hate to say this, we’re doing the same thing to the surface warfare outfit too.
And the hell of it is that The Obamanation and a veto-proof democratic congress will not re-equip our military forces and are likely to hollow them out during the next four years. It will take more than a decade to repair the damage they will do in only two to four years. The loss of trained personnel will be devastating.
WIth all due respect, the Navy has only itself to blame for its aircraft and ship building woes. The P-3 community set its self up for this position in 1998 when it started down the path to ASW irrelevance by emphasizing the AIP/Strike Support aspects of the AIP system. And then did not field the logistics to support AIP.
Along came the GWOT and the Marines and Army loved the responsivness that Navy aircrews provide and USAF can only envy-but the US Navy wasted, I’ll say that again,wasted 6 plus years casting about for a replacement for the Orion.
Same story is true for: EA6B, E-2C, EP-3, even for fighters. (JSF is needed by the Marines for sure-but the Navy would be just fine with the E/F/G versions of the Hornet. And a good USAF tanker). Let’s not even mention the self destruction course the helo community is on.
All because between 1999 and 2004 OPNAV fiddled while Rome burned.
Forget the politicians, when it comes to procurement the Navy is its own worst enemy.
Still have over 300+ flag officers though……………
I agree with everything Skippy posted.
The Aircraft in question was out of NAS Brunswick. As I commented over to Sally’s place, the PAO won’t say which squadron was flying the plane, but I suspect that every bartender and waitress in the area knows by now who it was and what happened.
In fact, I have always held the belief that the first place the Navy Safety teams ought to start when investigating such things is all the local watering holes. Pretty good gouge may be found in such places, and often by just sipping a beer and listening to the conversations around you.
They were flying old Orions at Moffat when my kids were born! (Oldest one has been a second-career lawyer for several years).
I commuted to Burbank in the civilian version, the Electra, in about the same period.
By not buying new manned A/C, we’ve made it so we can buy UAVs instead. No need for all those manned platforms. Fill the air with drones, my friends.
Glad everyone got out OK.
Yeah, Byron, I’m with you. The reason Pres. Reagan brought John Lehman in was to build Navy to a point where we would NOT be beating the tar out of our men/women and machines. You know, this notion that the Cold War is over is a poor excuse for not maintaining sufficient resources to fight our wars, be they brush fires or prolonged engagements. We have had more hostile engagements around the world since the Bear went into hibernation, than when he was out and about making a nuisance of himself.
When ships have to extend time between yard periods and cradle to grave times get extended for aircraft, we have to expect that there will be a dramatic increase in systems failures.
Skippy, I’m not disagreeing with your point that Navy leadership brought some of this on the service, and, yes, we could probably do with about 200 less Admirals, but so much of the fiscal shrinkage energy came from folx way above CNO’s pay grade.
Yes, some stupid choices were made along the way with regard to systems, but, more importantly, IMO, Navy leadership should have told Congress to pound sand when it came to budget cuts. There was far too much appeasement, when there should have been more “Go Screw Yourselves. We gotta job to do and we can’t do it if you knotheads whack our budget by a third!” As is sometimes the case, saving a career rather than saving the service appears to have been the larger motivator.
Tanks, Ships, Aircraft, Warfighters…all are showing the signs of a prolonged lack of downtime. ‘Pay me now or pay me later’ comes to mind.
Interesting that the subject comes up now as Mac & Sarah just release this: http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Multimedia/Player.aspx?guid=c9c68828-08e0-4f3c-a42f-7d81fc54c672
So, Lex, how went the Guinness gathering?
I have to agree with AW1 on this. Having spent a little time at Joshua’s Tavern I’m willing to bet that they have the straight scoop already.
The P-3 is a great airframe, but it’s well over 50 years old. There are excellent reasons the commercial world is not flying aircraft, and technology, from the Korean War era.
The sad part of the story is that these aircraft are providing reliable service in conflicts being fought by the sons, and grandsons of those who first flew P-3s in the 50′s. It is a damning comment on “Naval Leadership” that we have come to this point.
Fellers, I wouldn’t make any leaps and try to lump this one in with: “another F-18 rolled off the runway incident today”. I don’t know much but Bagram is unique. Let’s wait and see.
Re the rest of the bloviatiing above- Skippy has his points and AW1 has his sentiments but the Orion of various variants…ahem..has allowed our ground and attack aircraft to reign death on countless terrorists since 9-11..Let’s not forget their continuing contributions. Quiet contributions, albeit w/Per Diem! BTW, iIf the E-2 had sensors worth a crap (SAR/EO/IR) it would be over the beach too…..and not counting sorties coming and going and looking for that mystery Iranian Tomcat!
All that being said we sure have squandered resources, not taken care of business and made some horrendous decisions…
Like that S-3B Viking, an aircraft that is nearly retired (and still doing it’s business in a unique way..) with over 10,000 hours left on it’s venerable airframe without any SLEP OR re-winging. BTW, the avg S-3 has a little over 12k last I checked. Doesn’t that tell you something.
Yes folks, you heard that right. Unlike the P-3, Legacy Hornet series, Prowler, A-10. F-15 and many others. Leadership just will not acknowledge they made a mistake…Nothing new there. Connect your own dots.
Unmanned? Sure, we’re taking delivery of 1000 of them buggers next month! LOL.
b2
B2,
I fully concur about the results the P-3′s have had overseas. They have a good set of sensors and loiter time to support all sorts of missions. Not too much difference between ocean and desert in that regards.
My concern is with over-tasking. Your point regarding the S-3 is in the black, dead center, and those same airframes might well be able to be doing similar duties as the P-3 had anyone had the balls to make it so. Heck, you could package a whole squadron with sensor, land-attack and tanker variants all under one roof, and let them have at it.
Won’t happen, and that’s a damned shame.
No love for the 3P; apparently he doesn’t even make the crew list. Ouch.
Another one stricken. Humble’s projection for flight hours on his first tour has now gone to “Hoping for 1000.”
Yup, the Navy leadership fooled around with the Update IV (the acoustic software pubs were out when I went through Update III training in ’90!), then canx, then the P-7 and now hopefully they’ll get the P-8 soon.
I agree with AW1 Tim. As a P-3 aircrewman, I watched the fleet growing older and feebler as the demand for them increased – and we reservists guys finally lost all of the inventory (I know VP-62 and 69 are still around, but they are a shell of what we had in the heydays of the 90s).
Glad everyone got out ok.
Tim,
In a war there is no such thing as overtasking. You take a task willingly and you pay a price over time maybe…but you can never be overtasked. Ask the Army.
As long as folks, including our own good residents of Lexville, keep reading glossies, industry and Navy, like Vision 2020, etc. and continue believing what they read in Aviation Week, we’ll continue down the road to irrelevance.
Re the Viking. Never say never. Aren’t COCOMS needs important?:
http://blog.heritage.org/2008/10/08/video-gen-david-petraeus-speech-at-heritage/
b2
Sorry guys, I’m just not seeing the big picture here on this scarce P3 thing. What threat are they countering? The Deltas and Yankees are just about gone and all the rest of that clan. If it comes to a fight it will be, at worst, a regional fight against a country that operates no more than a handful of subs and most of them will go away early. In the meantime, the status and condition of these things can serve as portents and warnings of evil things to come. I recall a meeting of the sonobuoy club where the recommendation forwarded up the chain was to discontinue further sonobuoy production….
You’re not saying that the navy is like the USAF and requires 43 airplanes in reserve for every one that flies operational sorties are you?
dang shame…I always admired naval aviators’ navigation in the big to little sphere…employed same on several occasions…overshot the runway? And now Skippy ascribes it to politics/inertia…damn.
The Airframe is still sitting at the end of the runway.
We had a UAE C-130 that had an aborted take off and fire parked at the same end of the strip for well over a month. Scuttlebutt says blown tire on touchdown.
Curtis: It’s about over land strike. Picture in place of Harpoon…JDAM or some other such device. A bunch of hardpoints to carry a bunch of A/G weapons. Woof!
ASW is only one of a myriad mission taskings for the P-3, not the least of which is some really terrific surveillance capability. Pt. Mugu used to have some variants around that were near classified just to look at.
I had a P-3 F.E. relate once that the more toys on the wing, the more gas you could put in the wings. Something about stability; sounded weird to me. Any truth to that, Tim?
As an old AF type I have to say that what’s happening to the Navy is a damn shame. A few years ago I was in the jiffy lube on N. Carrolleton in N.O. talking in the waiting room to a retired Navy Capt whose car was ahead of me–C.O. of Navy’s last conventional attack sub–he mustered her out, retired with his boat–who was telling me about his daughter, an EA-6B driver, having to hands on fly her bird all the way from, I believe, Pawtucket down to Cecil Field (I think) because the auto-pilot was broken and that they were on a 3-G limitation due to airframe stress/fatigue problems. Plus lots more. “Don’t get me started,” he said. You hear stories like that everywhere…..
B2,
E-2′s are over the beach doing the ABCCC /DASC mission. Ask Nose.
The point is that the E-2 had average sensors-but superior operators. And had Carlos Johnson and Black Nathman and every one else not been so fixated on the Hornet program-new E-2D’s with the Advanced Radar (which will be eye watering in what it can do) would be going to the fleet this year. Same with Growlers and some sort of P-3 replacement.
P-3′s were the same way. AIP was good-but it was the, Pilots, NFO’s and AW’s who made it work. The reason the P-3 is in such demand is “customer service”.
You are correct the S-3 retirement was a mistake and with upgrades could have filled the AIP role nicely. (With SLAM and other weapons too!) Tell the powers that be thanks again for that. Gotta save money for JSF………..
RADM Bernie Smith told me in person once, that JSF was a rathole that was going to cost the Navy dearly. He said the USN needed to make a choice-E/F or JSF, but not both. I feel the years have proven him right.
Don’t even get me started about when the EP-3 and ES-3 guys tried to show the Navy a cost effective way to fix their platforms. It got them shut down.
Mongo,
One other point because this something I feel strongly about, if the Navy had taken half the effort it put into reorganizing itself over and over the last eight years and put it into getting things that fly, steam, and submerge it would be a lot better off. Plus in 2001 and 2002, CONGRESS was ready to fall over itself to give the services more money. DOD would not let them ask. Down sizing and transformation you know………………………………
Mongo,
I get the point you’re trying to make but I’ll just counter that by saying that I spent the last 3 years telling a myriad of “customers” that I could indeed meet their special security requirements but that we could not maintain that level of service beyond a single pump. There was no more sustainment left in reserve without going over the CNO redlines on deploying units. In other words we fought like hell to meet the mission but only to the point that we could sustain it for the duration. Nobody at all in aviation appears to have looked down the road when they rogered up for all these non-ASW roles and agreed to meet them with the P3 airframes and then turned around and have the gall to announce that the issue is vital and we now have a dire shortage of ASW airframes because they decided to spend the bulk of the money on meeting USAF missions with USN airframes.
Wasn’t it the F-14 TARPS that took over the role of the former recon aircraft? How exactly did we go from MARPAT to deep strike with the P3?
I don’t whine about it like some but I’ve spent much of the last 10 years in navy acquisitions and the ONE failure of the USN over the last 10 years to my sure and certain knowledge is that it simply cannot articulate its “requirements” and consequently every single program undergoes mission creep as more and more “good” ideas creep over the technology threshold and nobody, nobody can stand up and say halt! This is the good idea technology cut-off date and no more mission growth/creep will be entertained or accepted.
All of these acquisitions start with a simple premise, you know, replace the A6 with something more up to date but capable of doing 11 other vital missions or replace the P3 with the follow on aircraft with 41 more missions or replace the FFG with the LCS capable of doing every mission because it can swap modules….
It’s insane. The last best guy I worked for was an F-18 driver who had great ideas, endless energy, boundless enthusiasm and accomplished a hell of a lot and he went from totally in control one day to suddenly retiring the next day. Every single thing he accomplished was done by bypassing the acquisition rules and he ultimately paid the price.
If ASW is that important, some star wearing stuffed shirt at NAVAIR should have stood up and invited the AIP crew to go buy their own airframe or put the superduper stuff on the unloved, unwanted C130js that Congress kept foisting off on the services. But nope, they were looking for relevance and they were willing to sacrifice anything and everything to get it. In the end, it looks like they have.