Would anyone who is not the son of an Admiral and Grandson of another Admiral be allowed to fly combat missions after crashing four jets?
I suspect it depends on the cause of the crashes.
I have a friend who retired as a Navy aviator. Now, he wasn’t exactly a fighter pilot – he mainly flew a P-3 Orion out of Whidbey Island and later Patuxent. But he says that after every crash, there’s a review (board? system? something…) that looks at the event and determines the cause. Obviously, if it was equipment failure, or, say, enemy fire, there’s probably not a lot of fault attached to the pilot and no reason he should not continue flying.
My friend has never crashed a plane, but he have a dummy missile drop off his aircraft at the wrong time while testing missile release operations. According to him, no harm, no foul.
I haven’t seen any official reports of the causes, but he had some flameouts and collided with a power line.
Certainly the collision is his fault. The flameouts could be his fault or could be mechanical malfunction, or a combination.
The Forrestal incident seems to be complete speculation as to whether he caused it. Getting shot down could very well be a result of being a substandard pilot–but again, it’s more speculation. You kind of have to give the pilot the benefit of the doubt when getting shot down (except for O’Grady, but that’s another topic).
Without knowing the outcome of the accident investigations (which may have, in a time of war, been less thorough and/or more lenient), we’re just spitballing. You have one crash that, to me, was 100% his fault. Was his family a factor in getting him through flight school and beyond the crashes? Probably, IMO. But what does it really matter? People squeak through for various reasons–just look at Kara Hultgreen.
I could look at it as though he shouldn’t have been behind the stick at all, or I could look at it as though he’s another warm trained fighter pilot who was willing to push beyond the accidents and ejections and still fly combat missions.