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Calling all aviation historians. List for me if you will all the different causes of Ops losses. Here are the ones I came up with:

Engine failure
Structural Failure
Maintenance malfunction
Navigation error
Weather
Poor fuel management
G-LOC
midair collision
ground collision
Landing a damaged aircraft
Pancake landing
Poor Field conditions
Bird Strike

Pre-mature detonation of bombload....

CFIT - Controlled Flight into Terrain

Often happened in bombing and fighter maneuver exercises as well as normal flying accidents.

Ground loop
Spatial Disorientation

Oxygen system failure. It appears to plague the F4Fs in the early years, especially at Guadalcanal.

failure of oxygen equipment.
pressurisation failure ( obviously only applicable to a few of the later war planes).
detonation of machinegun/cannon ammunition (obviously only in live-firing exercises/ground synchronisation of guns)

You've all missed the biggest of all based on current operations:

Pilot Error.

Pre-mature detonation of bombload....

A B-29, testing a prototype atom bomb, had just that - a couple of days before Nagasaki. Caused them to change the fuse type to one different from used in the New Mexico test. Puts the lie to web rumors that we had "no" fuses that would work until we got the "right" kind from U-234 - which then were the "only" ones used at "both" the test and Nagasaki.
We had several kinds of fuses - half a dozen according to the Command pilot over Nagasaki - and Luis Alverez is a famous Canadian - not a passenger on U-234. The accident is written up in the book by the command pilot - Enola Gay.

If the history of the US 22nd BG is any indication, lack of sleep for the under-manned ground crew and malaria was a major and unavoidable reason, early in the war.
For this reason, ground support of any air unit is critical. The lack of it may be the root cause of most of the above!

ORIGINAL: Nemo121


"detonation of machinegun/cannon ammunition (obviously only in live-firing exercises/ground synchronisation of guns)"

When I was in high school, one of my school chums told me his father had been a B 29 mechanic, and had observed a taxiing B 29 on Tinian, which had its' 4 gun remote turret malfuntion, and start firing on its' own, cutting a ground crewman in half with the quad fifties........