Educational Media Reviews Online

Who Killed Lt. Van Dorn? is a full-length documentary that frames Van Dorn’s death within the bigger picture of U.S. military culture and how that culture contributed to decades of ‘passing the buck’ on helicopter safety. This well-documented pattern of maintenance neglect has resulted in over 100 deaths of enlisted military members as of August 2019.

There are two almost identical versions of the 53E, the helicopter that is the focus of this film. The U.S. Navy uses the MH-53E Sea Dragon to drag heavy equipment through the water, while the U.S. Marines use the CH-53E Super Stallion to move people and gear to critical missions. The Sea Dragon has never been shot down, yet has the worst safety record in the Navy.

Lt. Wesley ‘Wes’ Van Dorn was a Navy pilot from Greensboro N.C. who flew 53E’s and whose sense of duty and responsibility propelled him to become a whistle-blower. The film details his growing frustration with the lack of officer leadership around the issues of training and maintenance for helicopters that dated back to the Cold War, yet were still in the air in 2010 when Van Dorn began flying them. The massive helicopters require 40-man hours of maintenance per 1 hour of flight time; mechanics, under pressure over the years to keep the aging machines flying, started taking maintenance shortcuts and not following the ‘pubs’, as the step-by-step maintenance manuals are called. It was a vicious cycle: As ‘per the pubs’ maintenance was not prioritized and money for parts became harder and harder to come by, pilots and crew received less training and flight time.

Van Dorn was killed in January of 2014, on his way to what was supposed to be a routine mine sweeping exercise. The 53E he was flying went down 18 nautical miles off the Virginia coast; only one crew member survived. The viewer finds this out early in the film; the remainder of the documentary focuses on building a compelling case that the U.S. military’s reluctance to properly maintain and fund the aging 53E’s has resulted in a large number of avoidable enlisted member deaths over the decades.

The contributing factors (‘Don’t Question Authority’ military culture, a ‘Do Less with More’ mentality regarding aircraft maintenance, and the lack of senior officer leadership) are skillfully articulated through the use of in-person interviews, archival footage of Congressional hearings and news segments, selections from Van Dorn’s handwritten journals, engineering diagrams detailing safety failures, and official and unofficial military investigation reports and 53E maintenance manuals. Particularly effective is the film’s use of a short, animation-style re-enactment based on the testimony of the lone survivor of Van Dorn’s crash; this re-enactment vividly shows what happened inside the doomed aircraft.

Who Killed Lt. Van Dorn? is a thought-provoking title for this film. It implies a single person or action killed him, when in reality, it was a chain of people looking the other way and events out of his control that culminated in his death. The Navy, aware of the serious accident rate of the 53E, tried using new ships and minesweeper gear and towing with less powerful helicopters. Because nothing they tried worked as planned, they were stuck with the unsafe helicopters, yet money for spare parts and maintenance was frequently diverted.

The greatest strength of this film is the palpable sense of frustration felt as decades worth of documentation pointing out the safety issues of the 53E are highlighted, yet not acted upon. The sense of futility is pervasive as decades passed with no one in a position to actually implement change stepping forward to take action.

An interesting thread running through the film is the concept of maintenance. Service member’s lives depend on safe equipment, yet money is routinely diverted and/or spent on purchasing the newest aircraft instead of maintaining the ones currently in use. Multidisciplinary university programs or research networks such as this one that focus on maintenance of existing systems and ‘planned obsolescence’ might be particularly interested in the themes explored in the film.

This documentary does an excellent job of building a case for military negligence as the root cause of Van Dorn’s death, using the military’s own internal documents and maintenance records to highlight the chain of events that not only killed Van Dorn, but 131 other service members as of August 2019. Joining the military is a decision that brings with it the knowledge that you may be sacrificing your life in service to your country. Who Killed Lt. Van Dorn? calls attention to the fact that a decision to serve your country shouldn’t mean your life is sacrificed due to faulty and ill-maintained equipment. This film is highly recommended.

Awards:

Jacksonville Film Festival, 2019 Best Documentary Feature; RiverRun International Film Festival, 2019 Overall Audience Choice Award; Newburyport Documentary Film Festival, 2019 Best First-Time Filmmaker Award