National Guard grounds all Apache helicopters for safety review amid 2 recent deaths

National Guard grounds all Apache helicopters for safety review amid 2 recent deaths
UPI

Feb. 27 (UPI) — The U.S. National Guard said Tuesday that it has ordered an “aviation safety stand down” of all its Army National Guard helicopters for a safety review after two recent crashes that left two soldiers dead.

Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, director of the Army National Guard, said Tuesday in a statement that safety “is always at the top of our minds.”

This comes after Army National Guard pilots — Chief Warrant Officer 4 Bryan Andrew Zemek and Chief Warrant Officer 4 Derek Abbott — died in a Friday crash when their AH-64D Apache helicopter went down during training in the northeast part of Mississippi near the small town of Booneville.

Jensen said the aviation stand down — which went into effect Monday — will “ensure all of our crews are prepared as well as possible for whatever they’re asked to do,” although it is unclear how many helicopters the stand down will affect.

A separate February 12 Apache helicopter crash in Utah also was a factor in the decision to ground the fleet.

Nearly 45,000 Guardsmen currently are deployed abroad and on domestic missions in the United States, while the Guard supplies a substantial part of U.S. airpower overseas.

A February 2023 Black Hawk crash in Tennessee killed two, while a month later in March the same year another crash killed nine soldiers and was one of the deadliest training incidents in the military branch’s history, The Hill reported.

Authored by Upi via Breitbart February 27th 2024