When I asked for the U.S. Army's database of aviation accidents in June 2004, I was hoping to find out the accident numbers, scenarios and other details of the service's helicopter fleet.
As the military reporter at my newspaper, I cover the locally based 3rd Infantry Division, whose soldiers earned fame for their lightening-fast march from the Kuwaiti border to the heart of Baghdad during the first weeks of the 2003 invasion.
The division had suffered its first fatal Apache crash and a cursory look at the history of the helicopter promised a potential gold mine of stories.
I requested a record layout of the Army's mishap database from the Army Safety Center at Fort Rucker, Ala.
I had learned about the existence and availability of the database at an Investigative reporting event.
But which country had the most? During what years?
I determined the worst years and places for accidents were during the Cold War in the United States, Germany and Korea.
Using fields such as the severity of accident and type, I could do an even more detailed analysis, especially with SPSS, a statistical analysis program.
But, as David Donald, a former editor for the Savannah Morning News who is now the IRE training director, explained, SPSS does not like Access database files. So I exported selected fields from the main file to a dBASE file and used Microsoft FoxPro to check it. I learned on FoxPro a decade ago and feel more comfortable with it. Also, working with FoxPro does make it easier to go back and forth with SPSS.
I used SPSS to run frequencies and discovered soldiers were more likely to be involved in more dangerous ground accidents than in those in the air.
The story we printed went a long way to debunk the myth that the Army and other services were trying to perpetuate: more accidents are bound to happen during wartime as more is demanded of warriors and their machines. An analysis of the Army's own databases showed just the opposite to be true.
But the data and story did show that some safety maxims in the civilian world held true in the military one as well:
Flying was safer than traveling by car or in the Army's case, by Humvee. Not wearing a seatbelt can have deadly consequences. Failure to follow regulations, ignoring simple precautionary measures and other types of human error lead to more accidents than equipment failure.