The head of Marine Corps aviation on Friday said he is not satisfied with the number of training hours pilots are receiving.
Lt. Gen. Jon Davis, the deputy commandant for aviation, made the comments during an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute Friday morning as news broke that a Marine pilot was killed Thursday night when his F/A-18 Hornet crashed in California.
Davis said he tracks the number of flight hours each and every unit gets each week and that “this particular unit was OK.”
Still, he said the number of training hours for pilots across the service is not as high as it needs to be.
“We don’t let units fly if they’re unsafe, but as the deputy commandant of aviation for the nation’s force of readiness, we’re not where we need to be in the number of airplane and flight hours,” Davis said. “I’m not happy or satisfied with flight hours we’re getting right now.”
A recent spate of deadly military aircraft crashes has led lawmakers to question whether tight budgets are forcing training or maintenance to be cut too much. Last fall, Marine Corps aviation deaths reportedly hit a five-year high with 18 fatalities in the first nine months of 2015. This year, a dozen Marines were killed when two CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters crashed off the coast of Hawaii.
A Heritage report released this year found that budget and readiness shortfalls have left 19 percent of Marine Corps aircraft unavailable for use, placing additional stress on the rest of the fleet.
Davis acknowledged that the service’s readiness is not where it needs to be after 15 years of war. But he also said it is getting better, thanks in part to allies in Congress who have provided funding.
“The thing that I measure at the end of the day, I can go look at flight hours per pilot,” Davis said. “Today we are better than we were last month, and better than the month before.”
He also said that the service has been consistent in sticking with its plan to rebuild readiness and have every single unit in the Marine Corps ready to deploy.
“We’re a couple years off, but we’re tracking towards that,” he said.
