Ground the Harrier for life, before it takes one
What could have been is a scary thought, and what was might even have been preventable, if one considers the harried past of the Harrier.
Four-thirty in the afternoon on a Wednesday, that’s prime time in the Imperial Valley. Kids are riding their bikes in the street, playing basketball in the driveway. Dads are getting home from work, maybe drinking a beer in the front yard with a neighbor, maybe watering the grass. Mom might be getting the mail, getting home from work herself, unloading the babies and the groceries from the SUV.
In an instant, someone could have been killed. In an instant, any one of those Rockwell-ian scenes could have ended in real tragedy, wiping out a son, a daughter, a mom or dad from flaming wreckage or falling debris from a crash site that destroyed three homes in a relatively quiet tract-home neighborhood. Someone could have been burned to death, trapped in a house in flames, hit by a jagged piece of metal scrap hurtling in all directions post impact.
Fortunately, our worst fears were not realized Wednesday. This community is lucky. Our families are lucky.
Like many of our readers, I was born and raised in Imperial County, and I can count on both hands the number of military aircraft crashes originating from Naval Air Facility El Centro or downed cropdusters taking off from dusty private airstrips.
It just doesn’t happen around here, and that could be for a variety of reasons. It’s likely, though, that the skills of our local pilots, military and otherwise, and the way they maintain their planes contribute to that.
Can the same be said about the Harrier? Obviously not, as this jet has a lengthy history of malfunctions and crashes, has been the subject of exhaustive investigations, and the jets lost out of Marine Corps Air Station Yuma alone are too numerous to completely recall.
So why is this plane still in the air? Why is the Marine Corps using a jet over civilian air space that has been continually referred to as the “widow maker” and the most dangerous plane in the U.S. military?
Not even the British military uses this jet anymore. Once the crown jewel of its air corps, the British sold the fleet for parts to the United States in 2012, with rows of jets collecting dust and rust somewhere in the Arizona desert.
It was a financial decision, according to published reports in Great Britain, but the plane that many Brits had such pride in already had a history that follows it like so many contrails that just won’t dissipate.
This was the eighth AV-8B Harrier out of MCAS Yuma to crash in Imperial County since 1996. And while this is the first one to crash in a populated area in our valley, at least one Harrier has gone down in a Yuma neighborhood in that time frame. There was a Harrier crash in Arizona just last month.
Anecdotal evidence says we’re due for another such crash in two years, and that is just senseless. What isn’t senseless or anecdotal is the hard evidence the government has on the Harrier.
The Los Angeles Times report on a congressional investigation into the Harrier has been circulating on the Internet since it debuted in 2003. Yet here we are, still quoting from it liberally, still counting the wreckage and still jeopardizing well-trained pilots and whole communities.
The F-35C joint strike fighter, the same model locals have been fighting to get home-based in Imperial County, is in the process of being phased in for the Marines, as the Harrier is being phased out.
Is that why the military is apparently pilfering parts from a Harrier boneyard courtesy of the Brits? And what does that mean for the readiness and safety of the existing Harriers still in service?
All things wiki are not to be trusted, but there is a page out there called “list of Harrier Jump Jet family losses.” Although it looks as though it doesn’t get updated often, with a huge gap between Wednesday’s crash and the last Imperial County crash listed, what incomplete information it does have is as telling as it is troubling.
Dozens of Harrier crashes through the nearly 35-year history of the aircraft are listed, spaced among the United States, Great Britain, India, Spain and other nations that have had long associations with the only viable vertically launching and landing jet.
Yet it doesn’t seem so viable today, not to the three families whose homes are a smoldering loss, not to the Central Union High senior whose graduation Wednesday night was ruined for him and his family.
It’s time to retire the “widow maker” for good. It’s time to ground the Harrier for life before it takes one.
This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, June 5, 2014, published a day early less than 24 hours after the crash.