Aviation safety a long-standing military concern
 Atlanta, GA - September 17, 1997 - 11:29 p.m. EDT (0329 GMT) -- The
 United States has an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 military aircraft,
 as many as 30,000 pilots in the four branches of the armed forces
 and roughly $5 million invested in every one of those pilots.
     What no one seems to know, however, is how many training flights
 will be affected by the "stand down" ordered Wednesday by Secretary
 of Defense William Cohen.
     When CNN attempted to find out how many training flights would
 be affected by the 24-hour stand down each service must take, none
 could say for sure.
     It is also unclear if anyone knows how many training flights
 ordinarily take place each day. A rough estimate put the number at
 about 7,000.
     What is known is that safety has been a concern for the military
 since the U.S. Signal Corps purchased its first aircraft from the
 Wright brothers in 1909.
     Pilots, above all, know that military aviation can be dangerous.
 "In the fighter business," said retired Maj. Gen. Perry Smith, CNN's
 military analyst, "you're taking off in formation, you're doing air-
 to-air combat, airplanes against airplanes, you're landing in forma-
 tion. You're doing a lot of things in close proximity to other
 airplanes."
     Smith said the stand down gives the services an opportunity to
 take a fresh look at what they're doing.
         Military aviation safety dramatically improved
     "Where they can do better," he said. "What pressures are there?
 Things they can do with maintenance and training, procedures and so
 forth. All are  put into a report that all the services will share
 among themselves. And a great idea in the Navy might be picked up
 and used by the Air Force, and vice versa."
    Statistically speaking, a Navy pilot taking off from the pitching
 deck of an aircraft carrier in an F-14 is 24 times more likely to
 have a serious or fatal accident than a commercial pilot.
     Nevertheless, safety in all branches of military aviation has
 improved dramatically. In 1954, the Navy and the Marine Corps crashed
 776 aircraft, an average of two a day. In 1996, they lost 39.
     "That's largely because the airplanes are safer and better,"
 Smith said. "Many airplanes used to have single engines; they now
 mostly have two engines or more. The training is better. The screen-
 ing of the pilots is much better. The pilots are more mature and
 more disciplined."
     Another way to put the safety issue in perspective is that be-
 tween 1984 and 1994, there were 42 commercial airliners destroyed in
 crashes. During that same period, the military lost 1,523 aircraft.
     The military crashes during that period killed more than 1,600
 people. The number of passengers killed in the commercial crashes
 was almost identical.
                   'We train the way we fight'
     The U.S. military actually has lost fewer aircraft in accidents
 this year -- 54 -- than in any recent year. It lost 67 last year, 69
 in 1995 and 86 in 1994, according to Pentagon statistics.
     The primary measure of aviation safety is the number of major
 accidents for each 100,000 flight hours. That ratio was 1.50 last
 year, the lowest on record and down from 1.62 in 1994 and 2.10
 in 1991 when the Gulf War was fought.
     Army Lt. Col. Nancy Burt, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said officials
 estimate that this year's accidents-to-flight hours ratio was 1.40
 before the latest series of crashes. Now, she says, estimates put it
 at 1.50, identical to last year's record low.
     "We train the way we fight," she said. "It can be a dangerous
 business."
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     B-1 bomber crashed
     RAPID CITY, South Dakota - September 20, 1997 - 8:06 p.m. EDT -
 - A U.S. Air Force official said that investigators still
 have no idea what caused a B-1 bomber to slam into the Montana
 prairie Friday afternoon, killing all four crew members on board.
     At a briefing Saturday at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South
 Dakota, where the B-1 was based, Col. Will Fraser said the plane
 had been on an earlier training run Friday with a different crew,
 with no problems reported.
     The pilot was an experienced B-1 instructor with more than
 4,800 hours of flying time. At the time of the crash, the weather
 was clear.
     "They were scheduled for just a routine training mission that
 was to last approximately two hours," Fraser said. "We do not know
 what caused this tragedy." He said no in-flight emergency had been
 declared.
     Crew members killed were Col. Anthony Beat, the pilot, Maj. Clay
 Culver, Maj. Kirk Cakerice and Capt. Gary Everett.
               16 die in military crashes in past week
     The crash in Montana was the sixth crash of a U.S. military air-
 craft in a week. In those crashes, 16 service members have died.
     In response to the unusual string of accidents, the Pentagon
 announced that all air military training missions will be halted for
 a 24-hour stand down next Friday to review safety procedures.  The
 only exception is the Air Force's Air Combat Command, which will
 observe the stand down on Monday.
     On Saturday, the Navy went ahead as scheduled with the Neptune
 Festival Air Show in Virginia, one of the largest air shows on the
 East Coast.
     The show went off without incident. At the last minute, the Air
 Force decided to fly a B-2 Stealth bomber in the show, despite say-
 ing earlier that the plane would only be on display and not fly.
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