Posted on 05/03/2013 4:16:35 AM PDT by cunning_fish
A US cargo plane has crashed after taking off from an airbase in Kyrgyzstan, local reports say.
The tanker aircraft had left the US Manas airbase near the capital Bishkek, officials told AFP.
The emergency situations ministry said the plane had broken into three pieces but information about casualties has yet to be released.
Seven crew members died when a US civilian cargo plane crashed at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan on Monday.
Witnesses of the Kyrgyzstan crash told local media that they heard a boom and saw an explosion.
The transport plane was carrying a cargo of fuel when it disappeared off the radar near the mountain village of Chaldybar, close to the border with Kazakhstan, Reuters reported.
The US military uses the Manas airbase to maintain its operations in Afghanistan.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
A responsible thing for an USAF General to do is ground all these aircraft until what caused this crash is known.
This might be over-reacting, but one saying is better safe than sorry.
But then the lives of US Service Personnel are cheap to Obama and company.
He apparently is more concerned with the issue of Gay professional athletes than the safety of US Personnel (Benghazi as an example).
That was my thought.
Even if that isn’t what brought this plane down, this gives us a picture of what the foreign enemy combatant in our White House is capable of doing to our military by arming others to do the job for him (and then he can blame them and pretend he’s doing everything he can to prevent terrorist attacks while his hands are under the table giving weapons to Al Qaeda and his wife is in the hospital high-fiving Bin Laden’s son Hamza for the Boston bombing).
There is more to that story
Dear Ole’ Uncle has CIA connections through Graham Fuller.
Has has worked for a known front of the CIA as well
Don’t know what the Mysterious Uncle Ruslan is doing now.
That's on a 2 mile long runway I presume. I used to watch them taking off while standing fairly safely by an ATC radar.
With 20,000+ manpads on the loose, we have nothing to fear with Obama as C-in-C, now do we?
[ /sarcasm off ]
Right now I’m 60/40 accident/manpad.
One of the reasons I have hearing problems is the noise caused by the water injection. My first flight out of Castle AFB as a student was number 4 in a 4 ship Minimum Interval Take-Off (MITO) 12 seconds behind the tanker in front of us with 2 B-52s also flying water wagons in the lead. All we could see was black smoke until we rotated. At the time I was too young and dumb to figure out how damn dangerous that was. The steam jet would really make the earth move.
That’s because the KC-135 is all three. It has extra fuel tanks in the fuselage to transfer fuel, it has a large open fuselage inside to haul cargo, and it can have seats installed (or you can ride the horrible benches in it) to act as a transport.
They were all reengined a long time ago. The last E model (with the TF-33) is in the boneyard now as well. All that are left are R models.
They can’t. The USAF doesn’t have enough airlift as it is, and the -135 plays a vital role in that mission, as well as the tanker mission. With only the KC-10 to take over that would leave no tankers left to perform the mission if they grounded the -135 as a precaution.
Well, the earlier accident was clearly load shift. You can see the plane suddenly shift to its left and then an attempt to veer back right prior to crashing.
I doubt if this accident is nothing more than a tragic accident as well.
“Normal take-off was to 1,000 ft remaining pull back on the stick and hope to God it flew.
That’s on a 2 mile long runway I presume.”
Or more... I got to fly on a mission out of Minot in ‘70. We were to escort the Thunderbirds across the country and had a pretty full load. The calculated takeoff roll was 11,800 feet. I asked the pilot how a warm summer day would affect that. He said, “We wouldn’t make it.” As I recall, the runway was 13,200 feet.
There is a Russian installation within 100 miles, I believe. The USAF guys I'd work with would tell me of occasional fly-bys of Russian fighters. Not much to do about it other than monitor and send up your own to say hello. The area is quite volatile, and our welcomed presence there is the result of money. Nobody I spoke to seems to have any illusions about the place.
I know of a few civilian airliner crew members who've been roughed up and/or robbed while overnighting in Bishkek. The local officials there are not to be trusted, and armed escorts have been necessary at times. Aviation accidents happen. The one at Bagram this week was clearly a catastrophic shift of cargo at takeoff. But as others have said, losing a plane in Kyrgyzstan is inherently suspicious for many reasons.
But there was a case in the US Navy where an admiral took his carrier task force and was in a stand down mode.
There were just too many accidents (preventable accidents, that is) happening.
They straightened things out, and then went back into operation.
This admiral, I am pretty sure, became the CNO at some time after this.
I believe his name was Kelso. And I am not sure of the time frame, but it was either during the presidency's of George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton.
The USAF needs to have a backup plan -- of some sort.
“Plane exploded in the air before its crash in the mountains nearby Chaldovar village,” local resident Nurlan Derdenov told 24.kg news agency . "
A manpad may or may not be able to do much damage to an A-10. I believe A-10's have been known to loose an engine and still fly. Plus the fact that the cockpit is kind of armored like an army tank.
But KC-10 tanker, loaded with fuel, is a different story.
Providing escort, in this part of the world, might not be a bad idea.
It is unfortunate that the KC-46 is not available today but in the future.
Maybe the air force should have put more of a priority on their beans and bullets (tankers) than their fancy weapons (F-22, F-35 programs).
“Who was conveniently on this plane that didnt survive?”
That thought ran across my mind as well.
So we are to ‘understand’ that in an ‘uninhabited area” of Kyrgyzstan students just happen to be standing, with their cell phones handy to capture video of an American military plane break into pieces before it crashes ?
Man, they just LOVE that whole “-stan” thing over there, don’t they?
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