Braxton Taylor
The deadly Jan. 29 helicopter crash outside Washington, D.C., was the Army’s first serious aviation incident in months—but it came on the heels of a fiscal year that saw the service’s highest rate of serious crashes in over a decade.
Army aviation saw 17 class-A mishaps—that is, accidents that killed someone or caused more than $2.5 million in damage—during fiscal 2024, which ran from October 2023 through September. Thirteen of them have taken place since last January.
It’s “a year that Army Aviation looks back on in hopes of never repeating,” the Army Combat Readiness Center said in a damning annual assessment released just days before the mid-air collision near Reagan National Airport that killed 64 people on a jetliner and three soldiers in a UH-60 Black Hawk.
The accident has elevated to a national tragedy the type of training accidents that rarely make many headlines, at a time when Army aviation is trying to rebuild its safety culture.
“Now, in this circumstance, this just seems to be a tragic incident of two aircraft trying to occupy the same space at the same time. But I don’t see this adding to the trend,” Jonathan Koziol, chief of staff for the Army’s headquarters aviation directorate, told reporters Thursday.
Details from the investigation haven’t yet been released publicly, but President Donald Trump posted to his Truth Social account on Friday that he believed the pilots were flying above the mission’s 200-foot maximum altitude before the crash.
“We greatly reduced our accidents over the last year, based off of these safety stand-downs and stand-ups and the reinforcements of leadership and the right crews flying at the right time,” Koziol said Thursday.
The Army’s data shows a different story: a spike in mishaps in 2022, followed by a small drop in 2023, then an even bigger spike in 2024.
“There were several accidents. Yes, there were. And it’s terrible,” he said after Defense One pointed out his error. “And we’re working to make sure that we do everything we can to not allow those to happen.”
According to the Army Combat Readiness Center’s annual assessment, those 15 accidents were the most the service has seen since 2007. And the rate of 1.9 mishaps per 100,000 flight hours was nearly four times the service’s previous worst year on record, 2022.
The UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter involved in Wednesday’s crash is not the Army’s most mishap-prone aircraft. Only one of 2024’s major accidents involved a Black Hawk, while nine were AH-64 Apaches. From 2020 to 2024, the Black Hawk had 12 serious incidents to the Apache’s 17, with a rate of 1.23-per-100,000 flight hours to the Apache’s 4.41.
Still, the service has self-reported that “an ineffective safety culture was one of the most cited causes of Army on-duty mishaps” in reports during that time period.
Army data from 2023-24 shows that 39 “unsafe acts” led to class-A mishaps during that time: 24 skill errors, 12 judgment errors, and three intentional deviations from protocol. The mishaps include multiple instances in which a procedure or checklist wasn’t followed or an action was rushed or delayed, and one instance each of ignoring a warning and extreme lack of discipline, the data shows.
In late 2023, the aviation community conducted a stand-down: regular missions and training were temporarily halted so units can sit down and discuss the issue at hand. The pause was followed by a “stand-up” featuring training designed to improve awareness of safety protocols and procedures.
“We’re actually working on some more training material and leader development that is going out here soon, to reinforce that and stay ahead of it, not associated with this accident,” Kozoil said. “This was planned well ahead of that, just to show how important safety is to Army aviation, and trying to curb that trend that we had last year, which we hope was an anomaly, because the previous five years were probably the safest in Army aviation we’ve had in a long time.”
At his confirmation hearing Thursday, Army secretary nominee Dan Driscoll told lawmakers he looked forward to seeing the results of the incident investigation and taking action if safety issues played a part.
“There are appropriate times to take risk and there are inappropriate times to take risk,” Driscoll said. “I don’t know the details around this one, but…if confirmed, and working with this committee to figure out the facts, I think we might need to look at where is an appropriate time to take training risk, and it may not be near an airport like Reagan.”
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