The Death Toll for Aviation Accidents is on the rise amid budget cuts!

In the last three weeks, six military aviation crashes have killed 16 pilots or crew — a tragic development that has cast a spotlight on a growing crisis: Accident rates have soared over the last five years for most of the military’s manned warplanes.

Through a six-month investigation, the Military Times found that accidents involving all of the military’s manned fighter, bomber, helicopter and cargo warplanes rose nearly 40 percent from fiscal years 2013 to 2017. It’s doubled for some aircraft, like the Navy and Marine Corps’ F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets. At least 133 service members were killed in those fiscal year 2013-2017 mishaps, according to data obtained by Military Times.

The rise is tied, in part, to the massive congressional budget cuts of 2013. Since then, it’s been intensified by non-stop deployments of warplanes and their crews, an exodus of maintenance personnel and deep cuts to pilots’ flight-training hours.

“We are reaping the benefits — or the tragedies — that we got into back in sequestration,” said retired Air Force Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, referring to the 2013 cuts.

The sharp increase in mishap rates is “actually a lagging indicator. By the time you’re having accidents, and the accident rates are increasing, then you’ve already gone down a path,” said Carlisle, who led Air Combat Command until 2017.

“If we stay on the current track … there is the potential to lose lives.”

The rise in aviation mishaps has not surprised former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who led the Pentagon in 2013 when the cuts were enforced.

“We stopped training, for months,” Hagel said. “Of course, all of that affected readiness. It’s had an impact on every part of our defense enterprise,” he said. “And that means, surely, accidents.”

Military Times has compiled and published online a database of individual reports of all Class A through Class C mishaps that have occurred since fiscal year 2011, then focused on the 5,500 aviation accidents that occurred between fiscal years 2013 and 2017.

Of those 5,500 accidents, almost 4,000 were generated by the military’s fleet of manned warplanes — all of its bombers, fighter aircraft, cargo aircraft, refuelers, helicopters and tiltrotors. In 2013, those aircraft reported 656 accidents per year. By 2017, the rate had skyrocketed to 909 per year, an increase of 39 percent.

The accident data was obtained through multiple Freedom of Information requests to the Naval Safety Center, the Air Force Safety Center and the Army Combat Readiness Center.

Collectively, the records offer unprecedented insight into the rise of aviation mishaps during the past five years. It shows that the problems in the Navy and Marine Corps appear far more severe than those in the Air Force. And the accident rates for individual aircraft platforms vary significantly.

While hundreds of mishap reports involve life-threatening and fatal accidents, the database also reveals a steady rise in relatively minor incidents, such as a maintainer injured by falling airframe components, collisions on flight decks during taxi maneuvers or minor birdstrikes.

Across the board, much of the increase was due to a spike in those less serious mishaps, known as Class Cs, which include any incident that costs at least $50,000 and potentially up to $500,000 to fix, or leads to injuries serious enough to cause lost work days.

However, the rapid rise of…