Double Aircraft Crash in Same Hour?
Post #1409
NOTE: Hat-tip to the Naked Emperor for first reporting this on Substack. Also of note is that the original post has now gone through a significant edit.
Newsweek reported that two military aircraft, a helicopter and a fighter jet, both associated with one aircraft carrier (the USS Nimitz) both went down 30 minutes apart:
A burning question that arises is: What are the chances of that? To find out, I grabbed the flight crash data on the H-60 USAF helicopter:
At far right, the USAF keeps a log of all flight hours for this aircraft, and summing up the column under “Destroyed” can provide a cumulative (overall) crash rate. In Fiscal Year 2005, this model had a crash rate of 7.31 per 100,000 flight-hours, but the overall number is better to use — because 2005 could be an outlier year:
With 15 total “helicopter-destroying” crashes in its lifetime, along with 846,359 total flight hours of operation, you get a crash rate of 1.77 per 100,000 flight-hours — or 1 crash per 56,424 flight hours. When a single hour of observation time is taken as the interval, a Poisson process is set up with expected rate of 0.0000177 per hour.
Because two aircraft are involved, though — and assuming that fighter jets have a similar crash rate per 100,000 hours of flight time as helicopters do — we can double that rate:
This results in the following set-up for determining probability:
This online version of the trusty TI-84 calculator is set up to look for the chance of 0 or 1 events inside of a single-hour observation window when the expected number of events in that hour is 0.0000354 (twice the USAF helicopter crash rate). After removing this chance that “one-or-less” crashes are seen, the “double-crash” chance is:
Sensitivity Analysis:
Assuming that, during this 30 minute window, other aircraft from the USS Nimitz were also in-flight, here are the probabilities of 2 or more crashes, given different quantities of aircraft from this single aircraft carrier that may have been in-flight for that 30 minutes:
Aircraft In-flight ……….. Probability of 2 crashes
………….. 2 …………..………….. 6 chances in 10 billion ( > 1 chance in a billion)
………….. 3 …………..………….. 1 chance in a billion
………….. 4 …………..………….. 3 chances in a billion
………….. 5 …………..………….. 4 chances in a billion (1 chance per 250 million)
And finally, accounting for the actual time that passed between the two crashes (one-half of an hour), you would “roughly” cut in half each of the probabilities above. With 5 aircraft in flight during those 30 minutes, there would be ~2 chances in a billion for 2 crashes (1 chance in 500 million).
With less than 5 chances in a billion to witness two military aircraft crash within a single hour — even if 5 different aircraft from this aircraft carrier were in-flight during those 30 minutes — the evidence suggests a “possibility” that a foreign actor might have aimed electromagnetic weaponry at these aircraft to disable their flight systems.
Reference
[two crashes, same hour] — https://www.newsweek.com/navy-helicopter-fighter-jet-crashes-south-china-sea-under-scrutiny-10942491
[H-60 helicopter crash rate] — https://www.safety.af.mil/Portals/71/documents/Aviation/Aircraft%20Statistics/H-60FY23.pdf
[to add Poisson distributions, just add their means together] — https://www.probabilitycourse.com/chapter11/11_1_3_merging_and_splitting_poisson_processes.php
[online graphing calculator] — https://ti84calc.com/ti84calc