Two EA-18G Growlers collided mid-air over the Mountain Home airshow in May. A T-45 Goshawk went down in Mississippi last week. Two more Growlers had a near-miss the same weekend over the Pacific Northwest. An A-10 lost a wing strake. A KC-46 reported a critical refueling-vision-system fault. The list, when it is read in one sitting, is no longer just a run of bad luck — and on 27 May 2026, the Pentagon stopped pretending it was.

A new joint task force, ordered by the Deputy Secretary of Defense and led by the Air Force Inspector General, will spend the next 90 days pulling every Class A mishap from the past 12 months across all four services and asking a single, uncomfortable question: why are American military aircraft falling out of the sky in numbers the country has not seen since the 1990s?

What the Pentagon is calling concerning

A Class A mishap, in service speech, is one with a fatality, a destroyed aircraft, or damage above $2.5 million. The military has tracked them obsessively since the 1980s as the master indicator of aviation safety. The rate stayed broadly flat through the 1990s and 2000s, climbed slightly during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and dropped back to its lowest figure in modern history around 2018.

It has been climbing again ever since. The Air Force alone recorded a 17 percent increase in Class A mishaps in 2025 compared to 2023. The Navy and Marine Corps tactical aviation rates climbed in lockstep. And the figures for the first five months of 2026 — adjusted for sortie rate — are tracking even higher.

The factors the task force will look at

Several recurring threads have already emerged in service-level safety reviews:

First, fleet age. The KC-135 fleet averages 65 years. The A-10 is heading for retirement at the same time the F-22 fleet is being slowly cannibalised to keep itself flying. The Navy’s T-45 trainer has hit its airframe-hour ceiling. Older airframes mean more system failures, more maintenance-induced errors, and more demanding crew workload.

Second, sortie tempo. Operation Epic Fury — the 40-day air campaign against Iran that ended in early May — generated the highest tactical-aviation sortie rate the US has flown since the opening month of Desert Storm. Crews are returning from CENTCOM exhausted, and the post-deployment training schedule has not slowed down.

Third, pilot retention. The Air Force missed its 2025 fighter-pilot retention target by 14 percent. The Navy’s TOPGUN-qualified instructor pool is at a 25-year low. When experienced crews leave, mishap rates rise — the data has been consistent on this point for decades.

What it does not look at — yet

The task force, by its written terms of reference, will not investigate the operational losses in Iran. Combat losses are handled inside the after-action reports of the relevant commands. Mountain Home, Whidbey Island, NAS Meridian, Edwards, Robins — those are the names that will keep coming up in the task force’s open-source paper trail.

The mid-August reporting deadline is tight. It is meant to be. The four service chiefs will receive the findings before the FY2027 budget hearings start in September, where the political ask — for funded maintenance, for retention bonuses, for fleet recapitalisation — has to be defended against a Pentagon top line that lost $1.5 trillion to Golden Dome and counter-drone programmes. The mishap rate is now part of that political argument, whether the services like it or not.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine, US Air Force, Office of the Secretary of Defense.