Search off Japanese coast underway Marine C-130/F-18

[spazsinbad]

An open letter to the leaders of Marine aviation
18 Nov 2019 Col. Tom Hewes (Retired)

"The story of the midair collision ­between an F/A-18D and KC-130J on Dec. 6, 2018, as reported by the ­Marine Corps Times in September is now out for the entire world to see. It is, sadly, a damning indictment of the leadership at every level of Marine aviation....

...For starters, it seems apparent that VMFA-242 was deployed to the 1st ­Marine Air Wing neither fully trained nor ready to perform its ­primary mission. Certainly the problems identified in the Times report were long-standing and did not suddenly arise in Iwakuni, Japan. This indicates that the leaders of the squadron’s home group and wing were not properly exercising their responsibility for preparing the squadron for deployment.

Considered in this light, relieving those responsible at the squadron level was necessary but insufficient. What is clearly called for now is a thorough investigation of the relevant commanders and staff officers of the squadron’s home group and wing, with those found culpable, whatever their grade, being summarily relieved and reassigned or retired.

Equally troubling is the fact that ­concurrent leadership failures at ­squadron group, and wing level, ­heretofore unprecedented, imply that Marine aviation has a systemic ­leadership problem....

...Should we take another look at command selection and its long-term effects? And most importantly, are the most senior leaders of Marine aviation fighting to provide their subordinate commanders with the resources, including adequate flight hours, to properly train and deploy combat ready squadrons?

Until you as a leader can answer those questions with an equally resounding yes, you haven’t begun to lead your Marines ethically."

Source: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/y ... -aviation/

[spazsinbad]

Over on previous page this thread there is a link to a 1,600+ page PDF accident report (I've not read all the pages).

Faulty Equipment, Lapsed Training, Repeated Warnings: How a Preventable Disaster Killed Six Marines
30 Dec 2019 Robert Faturechi, Megan Rose and T. Christian Miller

"...The moon was below the horizon. The lights on all three aircraft were turned off. In total darkness, 50 miles off the coast of Japan, the two jets were to stick their noses into fuel hoses trailing behind the tanker’s wings. Even for the most prepared aviators, the training mission was not simple. Doing it at night made it even trickier. The night vision goggles fastened to their faces badly constricted how much they could see, like wearing binoculars to operate heavy equipment.

It didn’t help that Resilard had only executed a nighttime refueling once before in his career, more than a year earlier. His qualification to do so had formally lapsed [this is bad - so what did he say?], but no one realized it because a known glitch in the Marine Corps’ training tracker had yet to be fixed....

...Smith, Resilard’s weapons officer, had flown so little of late that he was getting nauseous when he did fly. On the night of the refueling, he’d violated regulations and taken a motion sickness pill, risking drowsiness…." [this is nuts for him] [reading this report the scenario only gets worse]

Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/mari ... c-resilard

How the Marine Corps Failed Squadron 242 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOUp6DcPfAo