Apparent wreckage of Norwegian plane found in Sweden

A rescue team found the likely debris of a missing Norwegian military transport aircraft in the Arctic near the top of Sweden's highest mountain on Friday, Swedish officials said.

There was no immediate sign of any survivors among the five Norwegian officers who had been aboard.

The Lockheed Martin C-130J Hercules transport craft lost contact with air traffic controllers at 1353 GMT on Thursday in high winds and snow as it took part in a 15-nation military exercise organised by Norway.

After a frustrating air and ground search by Swedish, Danish and Norwegian rescue teams, an aircraft crew spotted apparent wreckage on a glacier just east of 2,100-metre (6,890-foot) Kebnekaise peak on Friday evening, officials said.

A Swedish ground military unit then made its way to the area and found pieces of grey-painted metal and objects that looked like seat upholstery, said Jonas Sundin, spokesman for the Swedish Joint Rescue Coordination Center.

"The military troops have found some objects that are very likely from the missing aircraft," he told Reuters. "They are not 100 percent sure yet, but everything points to it."

The search was complicated by the lack of any signal from the Hercules' automatic distress beacon as well as snow, poor visibility and avalanche danger some 150 km (95 miles) north of the Arctic Circle, officials said.

Early on Friday Swedish rescue helicopters and snowmobiles had raced to an area south of Kebnekaise where a Norwegian P-3 Orion surveillance plane had detected a "heat signature", but no wreckage was found.

“Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.”

“The air is an extremely dangerous, jealous and exacting mistress. Once under the spell most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age. Even those masters and princes of aerial fighting, the survivors of fifty mortal duels in the high air who have come scatheless through the War and all its perils, have returned again and again to their love and perished too often in some ordinary commonplace flight undertaken for pure amusement.

— Sir Winston Churchill, ‘In The Air,’ Thoughts and Adventures, 1932.

The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes.

— Charles Lindbergh, journal entry 26 August 1938, published in The Wartime Journals, 1970.

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

— Thomas Huxely “

Looks to me as if the only good news here is that Sweden appears to have been taking part in the Norwegian-organized military exercise.

Just too bad they weren’t doing this sort of thing during the dark days of 1939 and 1940:

Back then, if Sweden had taken part in joint military ops with the Norwegians and Finns, Hitler probably could have been denied access to Swedish iron ore and Finnish nickel mines — thereby perhaps crippling the Nazi war effort, and perhaps removing the USSR’s “excuse” for seizing Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

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