The fatal flaw according to both the aircraft commander and the ground commander was the Marine helicopter pilots that the army was forced to use Beckwith had succeeded in canning the navy pilots but they were only replaced by Marines.
That's my site
While ONE Marine pilot screwed up, and totally, to blame the failure on Marines entirely is totally wrong.
They didn't use the aircraft they trained with, my squadron had to bone one of our 53’s to keep the RH-53’s operating on the Nimitz in the final weeks before the operation.
There is a lot of blame on HM-16 for not flying the pants off these birds to iron out any issues before the mission, but most likely, they were ordered not to due to operational secrecy.
The failure lies in fate; not in Jimmy Carter or the Marine pilots as a whole or in general.
In fact, according to one of the Marine air crews on site, they insisted they were willing to fly on to Tehran but it was Beckwith who insisted that all aircraft be 100% or his men wouldn't be getting on board that final leg. Beckwith cancelled the mission, not Siefert and not the Air Force Col. Beckwith did when he refused to use the aircraft with the secondary hydraulic system only.
The Marines of the mission never wrote books to make money like the Air Force and Army commanders did, and you would hear an earful.
And that comment on how Beckwith wanted Navy pilots only? That is bullshit, too, all services went to Yuma, Arizona, to TRY OUT for the mission, it was a secret elimination, you showed up and if you could hack it, you were on the team. Air Force crews that showed up, one team, refused to sleep in the tent city and insisted on staying in a local hotel 25 miles away. Sieffert immediately threw them out of the cycle and sent them packing.
I have other stories, but they aren't fit to print, it would identify a normally good man who made a serious error when he over drank one night. He was gone immediately.
That drills down to a lack of inter-operational training between services. That very issue was one of the “Lessons” learned by the military out of that whole event. It actually changed how the military operated, though not enough as was demonstrated in Grenada a few years later.... sigh