I do remember in the late 70's we lost a lot of planes it seemed like. One issue I think was with A-6 {can't remember variant} dropping like a brick right after launch. I remember at least one F-14 FD crash where the landing gear hit the round down. It snapped and the pilot hit hard starboard engine and rode it off the angle before jettison. That one was seen by VIP's on the bridge. We lost a S-3 and crew that caught the wrong wire. The public may not believe it but even allowing for the reduction in planes and pilots fewer planes are crashing. My cousin was on the GW in the Gulf War and they didn't loose a plane.
Dude, I was on the GW (CVN-73) in the Gulf War! We didn’t lose any planes, but we lost a helicopter in the Persian Gulf. It lost engine power, crashed about 5 miles from the carrier, and the crew was all picked up OK. There’s a bit of irony that the copter was photographed a couple days before it crashed and has a prominent photo in the cruise book.
For the AF jets that I work now, they were falling out of the sky in early 1980s. The 1990s still had some really bad spikes. In the early 2000s, I was going out to crash sites pretty often as a technical assistant to Safety Investigation Boards. Now I do about one per year. The Class A's have dropped to nearly nothing, most of what I do now is assist Class B and Class C mishaps, which typically involves looking at pictures e-mailed to me, analyzing parts/assemblies that they send me, and giving my $0.02 on what the cause appears to be.