- A US military MH-47 Chinook crashed in Syria earlier this week, injuring 22 soldiers.
- It's the latest helicopter in a string of crashes during non-combat missions to result in casualties.
A US military helicopter with a faulty rotor crashed in Syria this week, injuring nearly two dozen soldiers. It was the fourth helicopter to go down in recent months. None of the crashes were due to hostile actions, but they all left casualties in their wake.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) said on Monday that 22 service members were injured after a helicopter "mishap" in northeast Syria the day before, and 15 of the injured troops were evacuated outside CENTCOM's area of responsibility — which spans the Middle East and Central and South Asia — for medical treatment.
The military noted that there was "no enemy fire" reported at the time of the incident.
Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said Tuesday that the MH-47 Chinook apparently experienced a problem with one of its rotors, forcing the aircraft to make a hard landing during takeoff, but the Office of the Secretary of Defense clarified for Insider on Thursday that the crash happened while the helicopter was landing at a staging base.
"This is under investigation, so we will hopefully learn more soon, but as of right now, all of the service members involved in that crash are in stable condition," Singh said.
The Chinook accident followed several previous helicopter crashes earlier this year, which eventually forced the US Army to temporarily ground its aircraft except those participating in critical missions. None of the aircraft were under fire when they went down and were instead on training missions.
In one mid-February incident, two Tennessee Army National Guard pilots were killed when their UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed during a training flight in Alabama. Tennessee's Department of the Military said at the time that the aircraft "rapidly descended and impacted the ground."
The following month, at the end of March, a pair of HH-60 Black Hawk helicopters collided mid-flight during a "routine training mission" over Kentucky, killing all nine soldiers aboard.
"Everything we do, safety is integrated into this," a US Army official told reporters after the accident amid emerging safety concerns. "When we do any training — but especially aviation training — they do very, very detailed planning, very detailed rehearsals."
Just a few weeks later, in late April, two Army AH-64 Apache helicopters crashed into each other while returning from a training mission over Alaska, killing three soldiers and injuring a fourth invdividual. The incident, like the other two before it, was put under investigation.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville stressed during a media roundtable that this week's crash involving the Chinook was different from previous incidents.
"We have the world's greatest special operations aviators, quite frankly, no one can do what they do," McConville told reporters, according to CNN. "And they fly at a level that no one else in the world can do. And they do high risk all the time. And sometimes things go wrong when that happens."