YUMA, Ariz. - In the entire U.S. arsenal, only the Marine Corps' Harrier attack jet can lift straight up off a runway, hover like a hummingbird, then blast off toward its target. Though many had died flying it, Lt. Col. Peter E. Yount never thought the plane would let him down.
"Difficult but honest," he called it.
But in 1998, the Harrier betrayed him - not once, but twice. High above the Southern California desert, the plane's engine quit and refused to restart. Then, when Yount ejected, his seat rotated out of position and his parachute harness smacked violently against his helmet.
The 42-year-old father of two young girls died instantly of a broken neck.
The accident was familiar: Despite three decades of effort and billions of dollars spent to improve it, the Harrier remains the most dangerous airplane flying in the U.S. military today.
It has amassed the highest rate of major accidents of any Air Force, Navy, Army or Marine plane now in service. Forty-five Marines have died in 143 noncombat accidents since 1971. More than one-third of all Harriers ever in service have been lost to accidents.
Yet the Marine Corps is not only pressing ahead with the Harrier but also with a second trouble-prone aircraft that takes off vertically, the V-22 Osprey troop transport.
After 20 years in development and the expenditure of $12.6 billion, the Osprey is still undergoing testing to prove its safety. Twenty-three Marines died in two crashes in 2000 alone.
Undeterred, the Marines are to receive a version of the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter that can take off after a short roll and land vertically. The Joint Strike Fighter is being developed for the Air Force and Navy as well, but only the Marine model will have this capability. Still more such planes are envisioned.
This devotion to the Harrier, and to the challenging concept underlying it, is all the more striking because of the plane's peripheral combat role.
"If the Harrier had been decisive many times in battle, we would all still regret horribly the tragedies of the pilots who have been killed, but at least you'd be able to say that the Harrier made a difference," said Philip E. Coyle, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester in 1994-2001.
"What makes this situation so difficult is that we just don't have that kind of battlefield record to support the accidental deaths."
In the Persian Gulf war in 1991, for instance, the hot thrust-producing nozzles in the heart of the fuselage - which allow the Harrier to rise and balance in the air - made the plane a magnet for heat-seeking missiles. Its loss rate was more than double that of the war's other leading U.S. combat jets. Five Harriers were shot down, and two pilots died.
Critics add that, in the past decade, the use of laser-guided ordnance by high-flying conventional bombers and unmanned drones has diminished the need for the Harrier's brand of close air support.
Afghanistan provided just the kind of austere battlefield where the Marines had maintained the Harrier would make a crucial difference. Yet U.S. commanders held the Harrier out of the first four weeks of combat.
High hopes for plane
The Marines hope the Harrier will play a more significant role in a potential war with Iraq. But given the plane's limitations, many defense officials and military analysts doubt it.
In part, the Marines' persistence with the crash-prone aircraft springs from their position as the smallest of the U.S. combat services and their dependence on their financial overlord, the Navy. Since 1957, the Corps has nurtured the dream of a flying force so different from those of the other branches that its independence would be assured.
At the heart of this vision has been planes that could be positioned close to the edge of combat, able to provide transportation and cover for troops without depending on aircraft carriers or traditional airfields.
The hybrid aircraft were to combine a helicopter's ability to lift off from small clearings or damaged runways and an airplane's speed to race to the rescue of Marines in trouble.
The result, generations of senior Marine commanders have believed, would be a fighting force that was invincible and indispensable.
The Harrier, said one general, was "an answer to a prayer."
It was clear early on, however, that the answer came at a price.
The officers who died in Harrier accidents ranked among America's most accomplished aviators. They typically finished near the top of their flight school classes, often aspiring to become squadron commanders, generals or astronauts.
The Marines acknowledge they have had a rough ride with the Harrier but they say it has been worth it. Accidents, they say, are the price of technological progress, and the Harrier has proven its value in combat while paving the way for a superior successor. They deny needlessly jeopardizing lives in pursuit of their vision of a pioneering air wing.
"I would resist with all my moral fiber the idea that we would willingly or knowingly try to bring aboard a program - V-22 or anything else - and so fall in love with the program that we would put people at risk to ride in those vehicles," Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James L. Jones said at a military forum last year.
The evidence suggests many of the deaths were preventable.
The Marines knew for years they were flying a plane bedeviled by mechanical problems and exceptionally demanding maintenance requirements. Yet the Corps moved haltingly to fix known shortcomings that threatened pilots' lives.
In Yount's case, a mechanic incorrectly installed a part that led to failure of the temperamental engine. The ejection system that fractured Yount's neck had previously killed two pilots.
Other military planes have killed more pilots because there are more of them, and they log more hours in the air. But by the accepted standard of U.S. military aviation safety - major accidents per 100,000 flight hours - the Harrier has no peer among active planes today.
Major accidents are known in the military as Class A mishaps if they cause death, permanent injury or at least $1 million in losses (the dollar figure has increased over time).
The Class A mishap rate for the first model of the Harrier, the AV-8A, was astronomical: 31.77 accidents per 100,000 hours. Notoriously unstable, it had a propensity for rolling over and slamming into the ground. Well over half were lost to accidents. One tragedy-scarred squadron dubbed the plane "the Widow-Maker."
Promising improvement, the Marines replaced it with the more stable and capable AV-8B model in the mid-1980s. But by 1996, nearly a quarter of the new planes had crashed.
The lifetime accident rate for the Marines' AV-8B is 11.44 per 100,000 hours of flight, well above the combined rates for other attack and fighter planes flown during those years by the Marines, Navy and Air Force.
All told, Harriers have been involved in more than 300 accidents and 900 less serious incidents, according to the Naval Safety Center's aviation database. The loss to taxpayers exceeds $1.8 billion. And those figures don't include the plane's calamitous first decade.
The Marines have 154 Harriers. The plane is no longer in production but is scheduled to be used for 13 to 17 years.
Array of problems
Harrier accidents cannot be traced to any single problem, but rather to an array of them.
Failures of the cantankerous Rolls-Royce engines have caused more than two dozen major accidents. The Marines and the Naval Air Systems Command, which oversees Marine aviation safety, knew for nearly eight years that the wing flaps were prone to locking up, but it took three crashes, two of them fatal, before they decided to redesign the problem part.
To keep down weight, the Harrier is built with no protective armor. It carries no flame-retardant foam in its fuel tanks because the foam displaces fuel. The fuel tanks are not equipped with self-sealing membranes to plug bullet or shrapnel holes.
The U.S. Navy has spent nearly $9 billion since 1971 to buy and modify the Harriers and an additional $4.1 billion since 1986 to repair and fly the aircraft. The Marines are rebuilding 74 AV-8Bs at a cost of $28.2 million each, pushing the overall investment in some of those planes above $50 million.
Alan C. Miller and Kevin Sack are reporters for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.