SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — When a Utah National Guard helicopter crashed earlier this year, it was under the control of a fighter jet pilot without the necessary qualifications.
The February 12 accident is described in an investigative report FOX 13 News obtained though a public records request. The crash happened during what’s called an “orientation flight” to demonstrate the attack helicopter’s capabilities for a colonel in the Air Force Reserves, an F-35 pilot.
Flying a jet is not the same as flying a helicopter, and the investigators said that was key to the crash. Before the flight, the colonel’s Apache experience consisted of about 35 minutes in a simulator.
The flight in the real helicopter lasted 90 minutes. On the return to the West Jordan airport, the colonel tried three times to hover and land, according to the investigative report. Each time, the chief warrant officer in the cockpit had to assume the controls.
The colonel tried a fourth time.
“In a moment of panic and due to his great unfamiliarity with the… helicopter flight controls,” an investigator wrote, “the [colonel] reverted to his fixed-wing… training and applied downward movement…. This motion…was not the proper input in a [rotor wing] aircraft.”
The Apache rotated and fell from about 10 feet above ground before the chief warrant officer could grab the controls.
The chief warrant officer suffered minor injuries. The colonel, the report said, “sustained more serious, although non-life-threatening injuries, that required surgical intervention and rehabilitation services.” Orientation flights are common. A 2021 Army news release described an exercise where Apache pilots gave such rides to Hungarian soldiers.
But in the Utah crash, investigators found fault with the chief warrant officer, saying the officer’s “overconfidence … led to inadequate aircraft flight control management and inadequate altitude selection with an unqualified person on the helicopter's flight controls.”
The report also noted problems up the chain of command. It noted the 2022 crash of two Utah National Guard helicopters at Snowbird Resort and found a “similar leadership failure” in the Apache crash – that commanders were not relaying and enforcing standard operating procedures.
“The failure involved the need for more information dissemination from higher to subordinate units and personnel,” investigators wrote.
The Utah National Guard did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.
There could be nationwide implications for the crash. The report recommended the National Guard Bureau, a Pentagon office, reassess orientation flights in Apache units.