At Least Five Dead after Military Plane Crashes in Mississippi

At least five people are dead after a military transport plane crashed in Mississippi, according to reports.

The plane came down early Monday evening, sending plumes of black smoke billowing into the air above a field near Moorhead, northwest of Jackson.

Sheriff Ricky Banks told the Clarion-Ledger that at least five people had died on the aircraft, believed to be carrying nine.

The speculation of structural failure was apparently based on the radar returns from Memphis Center, and since they were so close to Memphis I'm certain that even after the transponder quit there was still a skin paint on the KC-130 during most of its downward trajectory.

The fact that C-130 breakups in the middle of the sky are statistically uncommon (can't you say that for all passenger or cargo airplanes, even the early DH Comet?) doesn't, in any way, rule out the possibility of an inflight structural failure.

There's another besides the firefighting, former ANG C-130A that suffered structural failure during a stress-inducing pullup while flying through fire-induced turbulence (and had possible corrosion issues from fire retardant). An AF or AFR C-130 (going into Peterson Field, CO I believe) had a wing separate after an engine fire, caused by erroneous engine readings (reading low temperature) that misled the crew to push the throttle up until the engine eventually caught fire. The fire burned through the wing before the crew could finish an emergency descent.

In fact I would say the C-130 is, from a basic configuration viewpoint, more likely to be brought down by structural failure than most passenger jets. The engines are not on pods, so an engine catastrophe is much more likely to lead to wing (structural) failure. It's a basic design issue common to all C-130s.

We don't know for sure whether it was structural failure or a death spiral, but I would say if they had good radar returns with data, and found wreckage over a 5-mile radius, and know whether the transponder was working all the way down, their speculation is probably a good educated guess. ---

Alan Hammons, a Mississippi airport official, told WNBD that “the plane was being tracked by air traffic controllers in Memphis and suffered a structural failure at 20,000 feet that caused it to plunge into the field.”

http://heavy.com/news/2017/07/marine-plane-crash-fbi-investigating-kc-130-terrorism-cause-explosion-mississippi/

The implication of the report by the fire department was that the forward cockpit and fuselage section separated from the rest of the aircraft. All of the incidents you cited and I am familiar with, are related to wing/engine related separations. Looking at the overhead crash site footage the wings and aft section of the 130 appear to have been intact.

Catastrophic fuselage failure in a C-130 would be very uncommon under any circumstance. There is no pressure bulkhead except in the nose behind the radar. So, failure due to pressurization would be a local blow out at a hatch, cargo ramp or window seal barring outright failure of the hull skin. Even that would not likely result in anything more than decompression at the site of the blow-out, certainly not structural separation.

We will not know until more information is released in the next few days and all of us are speculating on what we can glean from the limited reports so far.

Confirmation yesterday. On a sad note, a veterinarian bud of mine from Alaska—originally from Fulton, Mo and former Iditarod vet for 15 years—lost his grandson, a young marine named Talon Leach in that plane crash this week in Mississippi. Talon was the brother of one of my daughter’s friends from HS at North Callaway R1. Marcey Leach told Sally yesterday that Talon did not survive along with many others. God rest his soul and all others.

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