Posted on 05/02/2018 10:29:11 AM PDT by sodpoodle
Thanks for the updates. More coverage now being shared online and by the networks.
This is recent:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/military-cargo-plane-crashes-in-georgia-killing-5/ar-AAwE3Fn?li=BBnb7Kz
Hearing locally funeral home told to pick up nine bodies
Looks like there are nine fatalities. 9 on board. However, don’t be surprised if the don’t recover all of them. They were full of fuel and the fire likely consumed some of the bodies completely. It happens.
I was looking at the photos to see if I could see a tail number, but no. I was in the 53rd WRS when it was still at Ramey AFB in Puerto Rico and may have photos of that bird back in it’s glory days. Who know, I may even have flown on it. A sad end to one of the great planes...
I was a crew dog in the 7th ACCS at Keesler back in the mid-90s, before the unit moved to Davis-Monthan and was re-designated the 42nd ACCS. We shared an ops building at Keesler with the weather guys, and I’m sure I passed that weather bird many times on the ramp, enroute to one of our aircraft.
The Herk that went down in Savannah rolled off the Lockheed assembly line in 1965. When I was with the 7th/42nd, most of our “tails” were assembled in 62, and all had flown with the squadron when it was in Vietnam. During a sortie over Bosnia, I was part of a crew that took one of our airframes past the 30,000 flying hour mark—and that was 24 years ago. Of course, flying a racetrack orbit at altitude didn’t put much stress on the airframe, but 30,000 hours is still a lot of flying time.
Amazingly, several of our “vintage” Herks were converted to HC-130s after the 42nd was inactivated in 2002 and soldiered on for many more years after that.
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