Who Killed Lt. Van Dorn?

All right, so currently

I got 13K right now, about 13 1/2, looks good.

you like to cross by

your panel checks, over.

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You two currently's holding steady.

A Navy helicopter exploded off the coast

of San Francisco, eight crewmen are missing.

Two military aircraft have gone down

after colliding just north of Hawaii's Oahu island.

30 U.S. Marines and a U.S. sailor

were killed today in the crash of a Super Stallion

helicopter on this, the deadliest day for American forces

since the start of the war.

Five people killed in four crashes

in the course of two years.

Has the worst safety record of any aircraft in the Navy.

Reporters don't have much of an incentive

to write about this stuff except when it's a horror story.

But then there's no follow through.

Well what really happened?

Who am I suppose to be faithful to?

Am I suppose to be faithful to a general or a politician?

Where do your loyalties lie?

My suggestion would be my loyalties lie to the Marines

who go die on those aircraft.

He saw it happening and he called it out.

Unfortunately, he couldn't do anything to change it in time.

Lieutenant Wesley Van Dorn was 29 years old,

from Greensboro, North Carolina.

Van Dorn was a 2007 graduate

of the United States Naval Academy.

He was one of the Sea Dragon pilots.

And Van Dorn was a father of two.

Jax, why don't you help Dad?

He was, I always use the word magnetic.

Why don't you try one more time.

I met him and I just was like, "Wow, there are people

"in the world that are actually awe-inspiring

"and you want to be around."

Wes had a great relationship with his enlisted guys.

He took care of all of us.

He was just really big on making sure that all of his people

felt welcomed and felt like a family.

He was rambunctious, he was fun to be around.

You're a better person because of your time spent with him.

He'd talk to me about what we could do better.

What can we do better to be better?

And I think that was a question that racked his brain a lot.

'Cause he wasn't somebody who half-assed anything.

And that's what you should wanna do,

especially if your life's on the line every day.

Hey, Mom.

Wes Van Dorn long-dreamed

of attending a service academy.

He spent hours fishing with his grandfather,

a West Point graduate.

This is fourth, fifth grade,

and on into his high school picture.

He was 19 when his mother, Susan,

dropped him off at the Naval Academy.

This is day one, quite a day.

He's thrilled here, and he's a little thoughtful here

I would say.

But, he was very excited about his opportunity there.

Having been appointed as a midshipman

in the United States Navy, do you solemnly swear

that you will support and defend the Constitution

of the United States against all enemies,

foreign and domestic?

It was a very moving experience as a parent.

You felt that you had done your best

to bring them to that point and then you were

turning them over to the military

to let them continue to develop and grow as a human being

in the way they wanted to.

So help you God.

I do!

After he got his wings he said,

"How do you think we should choose an airframe?"

We decided together that the community

that would allow for the best family life.

Come on little Jeffrey man, come on.

He decided that he wanted to be defined by his family.

Look who it is, it's Mommy.

And one of his other friends, who was in the 53 community

at the time, told him that the hours he worked

allowed him to be home for dinner most nights.

Was that fun?

That he would only deploy once every couple of years.

And so Wes put 53 as his first choice.

Helicopters are awesome, I mean,

to make a school bus fly, lift off the ground,

to beat the air into submission,

it's a whole different glory

than just making a jet go really fast

and flying like a paper plane.

The two versions of this helicopter

are practically identical.

The Navy uses the MH-53E Sea Dragon.

It drags heavy equipment through the water

to sweep for underwater explosives.

The Marines use the CH-53E Super Stallion

to move people and gear for critical missions.

The 53 dates back to the Cold War.

It can require about 40 man-hours of maintenance

for just one hour of flight time.

I have so many nights where you have cried and bled

and sweat and cussed at this helicopter.

The mentality in the MH-53 community is that

we fight a battle against the helicopter.

Basically means, she never wants to fly.

And there'd be that day, that one glorious, beautiful,

sunset bluebird day, where you would get four 53s

all fired up at one time.

And everyone comes and lines the hangars,

and everybody's got their phones out.

The sight to just watch these four giant machines,

all at once just rise up, all the sudden become this agile,

powerful behemoth that's just effortlessly

flying through the sky.

It's a sign of just strength.

We had actually visited several times in Norfolk.

We were walking around and looking at the helicopter,

and we had his son with us, and I said to Wes,

"Do they ever have a day when you can fly your family

"and take us for a ride in the helicopter?"

And I will never forget that because Wes turned to me

and he looked me in the eye and he said,

"Mama, I would never take you up in this piece of crap."

And, I just looked back at him, and I didn't know

what to say because that was what he was flying.

The Navy 53s entered service in 1986.

In 2010, when Van Dorn checked into his squadron,

known as HM-14, the helicopters were worn out,

and should've been retired.

The Navy, in the late 90s, had started to come up

with a plan to replace these helicopters.

And then, when that plan goes out the window,

it's kinda like they're in limbo.

The Navy tried new ships, mine-sweeping gear,

and towing with less powerful helicopters.

Nothing worked as planned, so they were stuck with the 53.

And because the relic helicopter

was destined to be replaced,

money for spare parts and maintenance was hard to come by.

Commanding officers of the squadrons

are applying pressure down on these guys

to keep the aircraft going with fewer and fewer resources.

And so, out of that, all these bad habits formed

in which guys were taking shortcuts.

And that's when this culture of just get her done

kind of took hold.

When I checked into HM-14 I was about as green

as it comes to Naval aviation.

Everybody has these preconceived notions

of what aircraft maintenance is

because you've changed a tire on a car, or changed your oil.

That's not what it is.

There's a million preset publications

that are figured out by engineers, and they've decided

this is the way that you're gonna work on this aircraft.

So, to put it mildly,

we didn't do that.

It kinda always turned in to a flight hours first,

safety second kind of a thing.

And it was kinda one of those, as long as nothin' messed up

along the way, and as long as too large of a crowd

didn't see it, it was okay.

There's gotta be something wrong.

Shit.

The 53 has a serious accident

more than twice as often as the average military aircraft.

Holy fuck.

Three went down in a two-month span in 2012.

Van Dorn's sister squadron lost one on a runway in Bahrain,

and another in a mountain ravine in Oman.

Van Dorn's unit lost one too, in a radish field in Korea.

When you have a string of crashes

in a short amount of time, it doesn't necessarily

give you the warm and fuzzies inside.

And you don't get the warm and fuzzies

when you're on an aircraft and it's having these issues.

And I knew aviation wasn't always the safest thing to do,

but at that time I was young and I was wet behind the ears.

I was just learning, so I didn't ask too many questions.

But I really began to realize there were problems

the summer of 2012.

HM-14 had to ferry four 53s across the country,

to an exercise in San Diego.

The aircraft I was on kept getting main gear box chips.

That means the gears are coming apart.

We left Norfolk, Virginia with four aircraft,

and by the time we got to California

we only had one aircraft that was up

and able to do the missions for that exercise.

It's not performing to the capability

that was advertised to you.

Why are we having all these problems?

He would just come home