The Marine Corps’ top officer on Thursday said the military branch “had a horrible year last year” with a series of critical aviation mishaps.
Gen. Robert Neller made the comments while addressing a string of emergency helicopter landings this month in Japan, which he blamed on readiness issues.
He said there had been 12 aviation mishaps last year that resulted in either the loss of aircraft or the deaths of service members.
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“The majority of them, they were not the result of the material condition of the airplane. I’m just going to leave it at that,” Neller said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event in Washington.
His remarks came after a Marine AH-1Z Viper helicopter made an emergency landing Tuesday on Okinawa. A warning light went off in the cockpit during a training exercise and the pilot decided to land.
The mishap was the third such incident in January. That was followed by emergency landings by Marine helicopters on Jan. 6 and Jan. 8.
“Quite frankly I’m glad that there were precautionary landings because nobody got hurt and we didn’t lose an airplane,” Neller said.
The landings came after a CH-53E Super Stallion’s window fell on an Okinawan elementary school in December, and in October another Super Stallion made an emergency landing in a field after an inflight fire.
Neller said to combat such incidents, the Marines are looking to increase flight hours for its pilots, upping the average number of hours flown per month from roughly 11 to 16 hours.
“Sadly you learn from mishaps … some of them we still don’t know how we ended up where we ended up. … The critical capability here is we’ve got to get more hours, we’ve got to get more time in the airplane,” he said.
He also said the service is in the process of buying new aircraft and streamlining its parts supply “to get more airplanes on the ramp so that we get more time.”
Japanese officials, meanwhile, have requested that the U.S. military refrain from flying all Viper helicopters in Japan until they have been checked.
Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. said later Thursday that U.S. service members must fly the helicopters as part of the maintenance check process.
“You can only do so much with an aircraft on the ground,” McKenzie told reporters at the Pentagon’s weekly on-camera briefing.
“These actions are taken out of an abundance of caution and they don’t reflect necessarily a dangerous flying activity or anything else,” he added.
McKenzie also said he is “not particularly concerned” by the emergency landings in Japan. “I’m not prepared to agree that it represents a ramp up or some kind of aberration.”