Within the next week, the Marine Corps will ground its entire fleet of F/A-18 Hornet jets for 24 hours to evaluated the health of the aircraft and evaluate training and maintenance practices.

Responding to two F/A-18 crashes within the past week, Deputy Commandant for Aviation Lt. Gen. Jon Davis has directed wing commanders to conduct a one-day “operational pause” during which none of the legacy aircraft will fly, according to service spokeswoman Capt. Sarah Burns.

U.S. Marine Corps F-18 Hornet over Hawaii in support of RIMPAC, July 28, 2012. (DVIDS: Staff Sgt. Stephany Richards)
U.S. Marine Corps F-18 Hornet over Hawaii in support of RIMPAC, July 28, 2012. (DVIDS: Staff Sgt. Stephany Richards)

The Marine Corps maintains 12 active squadrons of Hornets and a training squadron. With 12 aircraft in each squadron and 30 in the training unit, that comes to 174 F/A-18s. Legacy Hornets have been out of production since 2011 and in the absence of a credible replacement have flown many more hours than the airframes were initially designed to tolerate, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with Teal Group.

“It’s not just the years on these aircraft, it’s the hours,” he said. “They have been taking [F/A-18]As and Bs out of the desert to replace worn-out Cs and Ds. The quality of their aviators is beyond question, so that is the most likely culprit.”

The causes of all recent aircraft mishaps remain under investigation.

An F/A-18C Hornet crashed Tuesday during a checkout flight from of Naval Air Station Fallon, near Carson City, Nev. The aircraft was assigned to the 3rd Marin Aircraft Wing, based at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, Calif. The pilot was able to eject safely and was taken to a local hospital.

The pilot of another F/A-18C that crashed Thursday near Marine Air Ground Combat Canter Twentynine Palms in California was not so lucky. Maj. Richard Norton, with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232 based at Miramar, was killed when his Hornet crashed during a training mission.

In June, Marine Capt. Jeff Kuss, a pilot with the Blue Angels demonstration team, was killed when his Hornet crashed shortly after takeoff in Smyrna, Tenn. A month prior, two F/A-18F – a slightly newer variant of the Boeing [BA] aircraft – went down after a mid-air collision. The pilots and flight officers from that crash were able to eject and were recovered.

In mid-April, the service’s readiness status was 87 mission-capable F/A-18s. In July, Davis told lawmakers that a lack of available aircraft had forced the Marine Corps to cut training flight hours but had not resulted in a discernible increase in crashes.

Davis testified before the House Armed Services Committee’s readiness panel that 42 percent of his service’s 1,000-plus aircraft are flyable, up from about 33 percent the last time he testified. “However, we are still far short of what we need to be the force of readiness,” Davis said. “42 percent is not good enough. It’s not good at all.”

Caring for aging aircraft that require constant, costly maintenance is not a burden unique to the Marine Corps. The Air Force and Navy have fleets of jets that have undergone comprehensive service life extension programs (SLEP) to extend the total number of hours each airframe can withstand.

The Air Force in 2014 temporarily grounded a portion of its fleet of 969 Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-16s after several crashes. Fatigue cracks were found in more than 80 of the two-seater F-16Ds, which have since been fixed.

The Marine Corps has struggled to maintain aircraft readiness as its legacy airframes deteriorate with no available replacements. The F-35B will not come online in time to fill in for lost F-18s, which have not been built since 2011.

Aboulafia said the Marine Corps’ issue with aging and ailing aircraft is a direct consequence of its all-in bet on the F-35B.

“The Marine Corps has it worse than the Air Force or the Navy because everyone else took some kind of interim plane,” he said. “You can still buy a Super Hornet. The Marine Corps refused to go with the Super Hornet to preserve the case for the F-35B…This is basically all self-inflicted.”

The Navy has invested handsomely in the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, a larger and more capable version of the legacy F/A-18C and D, which in turn are upgraded versions of the F-18A and B variants originally manufactured by McDonnell Douglas. It also has bought significant numbers of the EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft, whereas the Marine Corps still flies the legacy E/A-6B Prowler.

The Air Force has put its F-16s through a comprehensive cockpit and capabilities upgrade, including installation of an active electronically-scanned array radar in the nose cone and structural enhancements to lengthen the airframe service life. It also developed and procured a fleet of F-22 Raptor stealth fighters. The Air Force on Tuesday declared its F-35A combat ready (Defense Daily, Aug. 3).

In his July testimony,  Davis called for continuing the near-term upgrade of legacy F/A-18 Hornets and in future platforms like the F-35, which the Marine Corps was first to declare battle ready. The Marine Corps stood up its second operational F-35 squadron the week of June 27.

“We can’t get the airplane fast enough into the fleet,” he said.