Posted on 03/22/2011 4:27:12 AM PDT by kristinn
USS MOUNT WHITNEY, Mediterranean Sea, Mar 22, 2011 — Two crew members ejected from their U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle when the aircraft experienced equipment malfunction over northeast Libya, March 21, 2011 at approximately 10:30 p.m. CET.
Both crew members ejected and are safe.
The aircraft, based out of Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, was flying out of Aviano Air Base in support of Operation Odyssey Dawn at the time of the incident.
The cause of the incident is under investigation.
The identities will be released after the next of kin have been notified.
Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn is the U.S. Africa Command task force established to provide operational and tactical command and control of U.S. military forces supporting the international response to the unrest in Libya and enforcement of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1973. UNSCR 1973 authorizes all necessary measures to protect civilians in Libya under threat of attack by Qadhafi regime forces.
That was my question. Maybe a hydraulic loss, they tried to limp back to the coast, going slower in prep for a possible ejection, then a total loss of hydraulics (which means no flight controls) so eject...the plane enters a flat spin without them.
I don’t know. I just found the picture of the crash site unusual. I’d have expected either a hole or a furrow...
“What if you were in a vertical trajectory when the engines suddenly quit?”
If I have hydraulic pressure, I’d try to level off and fix the problem with the engines. If I don’t have hydraulics, then I can’t control where the jet goes.
A jet climbing vertically tends to descend the same way unless the pilot intervenes, so that would create a crater.
Want to know who they are?
“In spite of this, other volunteers continue to join the jihad. Nevertheless, not just any Libyan takes up the call to arms. The vast majority of those who have gone to fight in Iraq have come from the east of the country from in and around Benghazi. These fighters include jihadis such as Khalid Buisha who was killed in Fallujah in 2004 and Muhammad Abd al-Hadi Muhammad who was arrested in Iraq around the same time [2]. The fact that most of the Libyan volunteers have come from the east is no coincidence. Benghazi has traditionally been a center of rebellion against the al-Qaddhafi regime. It is a highly conservative area that has been kept purposefully underdeveloped, and for this reason it has developed into the main center of Islamic activism in the country. It represented the core of the militant Islamist groups that appeared on the Libyan scene in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).”
This is from 2006 so it is not politicized by the current events.
Al Qeda must be laughing their *sses off.
Hope the crew gets out OK.
They’re safe and in US hands. Doubly good, because you can bet if the Libyans had them, Je$$e would be on his way to Libya to grovel at Kadaffy’s feet to get their release.
Unlikely. Too much wreckage in one spot. Even in missile strikes where the crew gets out, large chunks of the airplane tend to fall far way from the rest of the bird, and the damage affects the aerodynamics in such a way that the plane “departs from controlled flight” and augers in. Here we see the nose cone, cockpit, wings, all in on place and belly down in the same attitude it would be in if it had done a belly landing. If it wasn’t for the broken vertical stabs, I’d presume the thing kept on an even keel after the crew punched out and just kind of crash landed.
I’m not standing up for Obozo (he is in way over his head and could have solved this with minimal air strikes a week ago) but the scenario you paint would almost certainly be solved by some special forces action, which is technically ground action but wouldonly last until they had recovered the prisoner and put her on a helicopter. Jessicea Lynch, only more involved.
The Desert One disaster was caused by a pilot error,not mechanical error.
That said, maintenance was bad during the Carter years.
Do you have a link? It was my understanding that the ladies captured when the 507th Transport Company was overrun were the only female prisoners taken in Iraq.
The first Iraq war, female pilots were shot down.
Yes, they will be quick to kill off any indigenous Christian Libyans (if such exist(!)); the last Libyan Jew left some years ago.
I have no illusions about the nature of the people we are helping.
If one engine went kablooey (that's a technical term) and shot parts into the other engine, that would take care of that right there. It's happened (rarely) on B-52s where an engine came apart and the other engine on the pod was toast as well. Of course, in a BUFF you keep flying on the other six engines.
Whether this war is a good idea or not, your repeated posts about bankrupting the country by fighting in the Middle East are pure crap.
For example, we’ve spent less than $800 billion on Iraq up to now. That’s 8 years. Meanwhile, the deficit for just last year is $1.5 trillion, or almost twice that. Between 1965 and 2000, we spent around $9 trillion on welfare in year 2000 dollars. As a percentage of GNP our military spending is around 4-4.5% in recent years. Where do you think social spending is as a percentage of GNP? If you add in education (which costs about 3 times as much per student as it did in 1970) where are we at on percentage?
Didn’t Obama say the other day that none of our aircraft would be flying over Libya to create the impression that the French and British would be patrolling. Now we learn that our B-2s have been dropping ordinance and the bulk of the patrols are our F-15s. The French wanted this war. The French should be doing the bulk of the patrols. Did they make one first sortie and then turn over the operation to the US.Libya may be of vital interest to the Franch but Libya is as much of a vital interest to the US as were Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo.Obama has been had by the Europeans. We need to get the heck out of NATO and leave Western Europe to take care of their own interests.
The F-15E flies low level missions. In fact, one of its nicknames is "The Mudhen" for that reason. They're actually in prime birdstrike territory during operations. So were B-52s back in the day when their primary mission would have been to preenetrate Soviet airspace. Saw a B-52 get hit by some birds; they punched right through the skin of the wing and penetrated to the forward wing spar before becoming red jelly and feathers.
Strike Eagles fly low level under the radar to strike targets deep in enemy territory.
Awesome, thanks for serving. Pilot or WSO?
I thought we were talking about 2003, not 1991.
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