The US Army National Guard announced it was taking the extraordinary step of grounding all helicopters across the service after its second crash in less than two weeks.
The announcement was made Tuesday by National Guard Director Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen after a deadly helicopter crash killed two pilots on a training mission over a rural wooded area near Booneville, Mississippi.
“The director of the Army National Guard has ordered an aviation safety stand down of all Army National Guard helicopter units to review safety policies and procedures following two recent helicopter crashes,” read a statement on the National Guard’s website. “The stand down went into effect Monday.”
“Mississippi Army National Guard pilots Chief Warrant Officer 4 Bryan Andrew Zemek and Chief Warrant Officer 4 Derek Joshua Abbott died in the February 23 crash,” the statement continued.
The Army’s Combat Readiness Center is investigating the cause of the recent crashes, which has not been publicly commented upon. A separate crash occurred February 12 in Utah, with the two pilots surviving. Both crashes involved Apache helicopters.
The National Guard suffered another pair of crashes in 2023 that involved Black Hawk helicopters. An accident in February of that year claimed the lives of two service members from Tennessee, while another in March killed nine. The March accident, which involved a mid-air collision in Kentucky, was one of the worst in the history of the National Guard.
The announcement comes not long after the US Marine Corps grounded all Osprey aircraft in use by the service late last year. The move was in response to a crash off the coast of Japan that killed eight Air Force Special Operations Command service members. The Osprey, which is able to take off vertically and rotate its propellers to fly like a turboprop aircraft, has had a troubled history, claiming the lives of 50 US troops in various accidents.