While the Tom Cruise sequel to 1986’s Top Gun (Top Gun: Maverick) shatters multiple box-office records and excites an entire generation of young people who want to become fighter pilots, a disturbing trend of military aircraft crashes emerges in Southern California in less than a week.
The latest is an MH-60S Seahawk that crashed along the Arizona-California border Thursday near El Centro, California. All four of the helicopter’s crew members survived with non-life-threatening injuries.
The crash comes just one day after five Marines were killed in an MV-22B Osprey near Glamis, California. Both Osprey and Seahawk crashed about 100 miles away from each other.
Last Friday, further north, a F/A-18E Super Hornet crashed in the Mojave Desert in San Bernardino County, killing the pilot.
All three military aircraft crashed within one week of each other in Southern California.
The aviation disasters come as the military actively uses Cruise’s patriotic action film to boost recruitment since numbers have been dismal over the last several years.
The number of internet searches for “how to become a fighter pilot” have gone parabolic since the Top Gun: Maverick debuted in theaters on May 27.
And according to Defense News, more than half the Navy’s aircraft are grounded because there’s not enough money to fix them. The Air Force has a similar issue. Only 71.5% of the service’s fleet is mission ready. America’s aging military appears to have reliability issues, even though it outspends the entire world. It’s unknown whether the three aircraft experienced mechanical problems.
