National Guard grounds all Apache helicopters for safety review amid 2 recent deaths

Feb. 27 (UPI) -- The U.S. National Guard said Tuesday that it has ordered an "aviation safety stand down" of all its Army National Guard helicopters for a safety review after two recent crashes that left two soldiers dead.

Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, director of the Army National Guard, said Tuesday in a statement that safety "is always at the top of our minds."

This comes after Army National Guard pilots -- Chief Warrant Officer 4 Bryan Andrew Zemek and Chief Warrant Officer 4 Derek Abbott -- died in a Friday crash when their AH-64D Apache helicopter went down during training in the northeast part of Mississippi near the small town of Booneville.

Jensen said the aviation stand down -- which went into effect Monday -- will "ensure all of our crews are prepared as well as possible for whatever they're asked to do," although it is unclear how many helicopters the stand down will affect.

A separate February 12 Apache helicopter crash in Utah also was a factor in the decision to ground the fleet.

Nearly 45,000 Guardsmen currently are deployed abroad and on domestic missions in the United States, while the Guard supplies a substantial part of U.S. airpower overseas.

A February 2023 Black Hawk crash in Tennessee killed two, while a month later in March the same year another crash killed nine soldiers and was one of the deadliest training incidents in the military branch's history, The Hill reported.