I wonder if a MANPAD struck this aircraft or another Surface-To-Air missile of some sort.. Perhaps part of the scores of MANPADs that are ‘missing’?
So far, no evidence of a MANPAD attack; but it is rather odd that we’ve lost three aircraft in that region over the past week; a civilian 747 cargo jet that went down at Bagram (load shifted on takeoff, sending the aircraft into a stall); an RC-12 recce bird that went down in southern Afghanistan, and more recently, the KC-135.
The Stratotanker has been around forever, and it’s a very reliable platform—almost no history of them simply blowing up in mid-air. At first glace, it sounds a bit like a KC-135 that exploded while descending in to Howard AFB, Panama back in the 1980s. It was eventually determined that the crew left a pump running in an empty fuel tank after their in-flight refueling operation was complete. The pump overheated and ignited fuel vapors that remained in the tank. However, fixes were supposedly implemented to prevent that from happening again.