The wings folded up and fell off. It looked to be on fire before it hit.
Posted on 06/17/2002 6:10:31 PM PDT by michigander
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:40 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WALKER, Calif. -- Three crewmen confirmed dead in crash of air tanker fighting blaze near Yosemite National Park, Federal Aviation Administration says.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Fire-Fighting Air Tanker Crashes
By TOM GARDNER
Associated Press Writer
June 17, 2002, 8:22 PM EDTWALKER, Calif. -- An air tanker fighting a blaze near Yosemite National Park caught fire Monday and crashed in this Northern California resort town, authorities and witnesses said. There was no immediate word on casualties.
Medical crews were sent to the mountain hamlet after the plane went down in a ball of flames, said Laura Williams, spokeswoman for the Sierra Front Interagency Dispatch Center in Minden, Nev.
Williams said she had no information on the crew and it wasn't clear whether anyone on the ground was injured. She said firefighting tankers typically carry three people.
Other aircraft battling the fire were grounded. High winds had grounded tankers and helicopters Sunday.
Terri Russell, a reporter for KOLO-TV in Reno who witnessed the crash, said one of the plane's wings was on fire before the tanker lost altitude and crashed within 150 feet of an auto shop.
"I'm standing here looking at the tail section," shop owner Mike Mandichaka told The Associated Press by telephone. "My shop is right next door. It almost hit it."
The tanker was battling a 6,500-acre blaze that has forced 400 people out of their homes in Walker, which is 90 miles south of Reno, Nev., and about 25 miles north of Yosemite. At least one home has burned.
Many residents made a narrow escape from wind-whipped flames Sunday night.
"The flames were coming down the mountain toward the town so it was time to go," Dan McCall said as he watched the fire burn a few miles east of town Monday afternoon.
"You could feel the heat and hear the roar of the flames," he said.
The fire began Saturday in a remote section of the Humbolt-Toiyabe National Forest that the Marines use for survival training. Unexploded ordnance in the steep, rugged area was slowing containment efforts, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
The agency said the fire was "human" caused but had no other details. It was only 7 percent contained Monday and was being fought by some 600 firefighters.
* __
On the Net:
Fire centers: http://www.nifc.gov and http://sierrafront.net
And this is the first post? I'm shocked!
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That lady in Col. better be praying something like this doesn't happen there.
It's a C-130.
May the Good Lord have Mercy on their souls.
With utmost regards
alfa6 ;>{
It's a C-130.
One of the baled C130B models the military released a few years back, I suppose. This isn't the only recent problem with a C130B.
-archy-/-
Confirmed in the story linked in reply #6.
Air Tanker Fighting California Wildfire Crashes Into Mountain
June 17, 2002
By KOMO Staff & News ServicesWALKER, CALIF. - An air tanker fighting a blaze near Yosemite National Park caught fire Monday and crashed in the Northern California resort town of Walker, killing all three crew members and just missing a mechanic's shop, authorities and witnesses said.
"He just came from out of the sky and into the ground," said one witness. "I was on the other side of the crash... I knew, I watched him fly over and all I heard was an explosion 'Boom, Boom.' "
A Reno, Nev., television station captured the scene on videotape as the wings broke off the C-130 transport plane, the fiery fuselage rolled left and spiraled nose first into the ground in a ball of flame.
"The plane landed, that's just how he came across, we all were watching, they dumped the last of his load, and he was on fire, when he dumped the last of this load -- we were all of course very much surprised and alarmed because it looked like he didn't have the chance to clear the power lines," said another witness.
All three crew members were killed in the crash "under unknown circumstances after making a drop" of retardant, said Jerry Johnston, operations officer with the Federal Aviation Administration in Hawthorne, Calif.
"It was destroyed by impact and by fire," he said. Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board were on the way to the scene.
It was unclear whether anyone on the ground was injured, though medical crews were on the way, said Laura Williams, spokeswoman for the Sierra Front Interagency Dispatch Center in Minden, Nev.
Witnesses said the plane crashed within 150 feet of an auto shop.
"I'm standing here looking at the tail section," shop owner Mike Mandichaka told The Associated Press by telephone. "My shop is right next door. It almost hit it."
The tanker was battling an 8,000-acre blaze that had forced 400 people out of their homes in Walker, which is 90 miles south of Reno, Nev., and about 25 miles north of Yosemite. At least one home has burned.
Other aircraft battling the fire were grounded.
KOLO-TV's news crew was interviewing a man watching the skies with his own camcorder near Walker Sporting Goods Mobile Home Park when the plane came into view.
The plane came in low to the ground trailing a red flow of fire retardant above tall green pines. Both wings suddenly snapped off, with flashes of flame as they separated.
"We saw it circle around once and then drop through the middle there. ... That's where we saw it break up," KOLO-TV reporter Terri Russell said.
The fire from the crash threatened about 10 structures in the immediate area, including homes, trailers and the mechanic's shop.
The wildfire began Saturday in a remote section of the Humbolt-Toiyabe National Forest that the Marines use for survival training. Unexploded ordnance in the steep, rugged area was slowing containment efforts, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
The agency said the fire was "human" caused but had no other details. It was 10 percent contained Monday evening - up from 7 percent earlier in the day - and was being fought by some 671 firefighters.
Actually if the fire was deliberately set, the person will be charged with 3 counts of murder.
Plus being old & at the end of useful life puts this wear & tear in an exponential rise.
Probably a C-130A but the stills and the video are too small to see.
On the plus side, death was quick and merciful, and the bodies won't be burned.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Thanks for posting these pics. Here's the sequence as shown in these four pics.
No doubt Reed Irvine and the TWA 800 loonies will say it was a missile.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
You are a sick piece of crap. Here's another one of your recent posts so people don't think I'm over-reacting.
(National Guard) Helicopter Crashes During Rescue Attempt ^
Posted by Archaeus to B Knotts
On News/Activism ^ May 30 6:37 PM #20 of 47 ^
"Cool video. That kicked ass!"
Unbelievably thoughtless and sick. Videos of brave heroes dying turn you on? Sick bastard.
Maybe we could arrange for a "friggin lawn dart" to be pitched through your head with cameras rolling. Think how cool that video would be.
Hopefully they weren't AC130s, which are tghe Spectre gunships used for fire support missions of another kind altogether, but more likely TC130s, the air tanker [nonfuel] configuration.
Yep, the H&P C130 and other aircraft, oft seen with a red fuselage stripe, are a common sight at wildfire operations, as are those of other operators of the early C130A and B models. A clue for you when observing them in your area: the original C130A versions had propellers with three blades, while the 130B models have four, though many of the earlier aircraft have been refitted with later props and powerplants.
Though of course H&P and several of the other C130 contract operators got caught with their fingers in the cookie jar a couple of years back.
Well, they may have less on-board telemetry -- I don't know if this plane had black boxes -- but they've got at least this one video which appears to show the entire incident, from start to finish (at least, the visible start). There aren't many airline disasters that have such close up video for the engineers to study.
--KotS
Crew, Hawkins and Powers C-130 Herc AT130 #130.
Captain Steve Wass,
Right seat Craig LaBare,
Engineer Mike Davis
- IA Dispatcher - IA Dispatcher Air Tanker AT130 at the CrossRoads fire, May 1999, Coronado National Forest, near Sonoita, AZ. Tanker 130 from Libby Tanker Base. According to the pilot of Tanker 130, this aircraft was the first C130 air tanker converted. Photo taken by USFS FEO.
Or more likely,a coverup of criminal activity of another sort. But then what are the lives of a dozen or so firefighters when there's big money to be made flying Bolivian cocaine into Arkansas, even if it is the fire season, right?
Happily, the Arizona jury that convicted aircraft broker Roy Reagan and Forest Service supervisor Fred Fuchs of criminal conspiracy in 1997 after the deaths of 14 firefighters deprived of air tanker support after the C130s that were to have supported them were diverted welsewhere felt otherwise. But I suppose you would have told their families how such things just can't possibly be so.
Another component to the C-130 story that tends to be forgotten is the needless death of 14 fire fighters, 6 July 1994. "The Report of the South Canyon Fire Accident Investigation Team," signed by Mike Dombeck, Director of the Bureau of Land Management, and Jack Ward Thomas, Chief, U.S. Forest Service (USFS), 17 August 1994, listed as one of the "contributing causes" that "Air support was inadequate for implementing stragegies [sic] and tactics on July 6" (p. 37).
OSHA cited the Bureau of Land Management and USFS for violations of "standard fire fighting procedures" (AP, 8 February 1995).
What was not mentioned in the official reports was why there was no air-tanker fire suppression. Answer, the USFS was so damned busy playing Smoky the Spook with the C-130 scams that it forgot what its real job was. It let the fire-fighting tanker system go into the toilet while it played games for the CIA, moving C-130s and P-3s into covert operations all over the planet under the pretext of upgrading the air-tanker fire-fighting system.
Fourteen young Americans died because U.S. Government officials violated their responsibility to do the job they were hired to do. Heart-tugging statues to the dead are chump change. Some officials should be busted for manslaughter and go straight to prison.
Drunk drivers go to prison for killing people on the highway — why are top government officials exempt from prosecution for criminal conduct that kills 14 fire fighters?
No, not strange. Uncommon perhaps, but that is exactly what happens to wings when you overload and over G a plane, the wings just snap off.
Those are old aircraft, with many cycles on the airframes. It hasn't been too long ago when another large transport aircraft sitting on the ground lost a wing during refueling. It just fell off. It's not strange so much as it is sad. God bless these firefighters and give comfort to their families.
/john
"M" in aviation nomenclature means "Multimission" which is usually the prefix for a special ops aircraft (the exception is the V-22 Osprey, where the MV-22 is the cargo variant and CV-22 the special ops version... but that is not fielded yet).
The USAF MC-130 is also called the "Combat Talon" so if you do a Google search for that term (use the quotes) you will learn much of the publically available information on it. It isn't safer per se, theM modifications are geared to flying undetected through 1000 miles of enemy territory to drop off agents or special operations forces. It can also drop leaflets, land on places you'd never expect a sixty ton airplane to land, and drop the BLU-15.
While the letters before the numbers in a military plane's nomenclature describe it's intended use (C cargo, F fighter) and the prefixes describe any speciality use (MC multimission [spec ops]cargo, HC rescue cargo, WC weather cargo, EC electronic-warfare cargo, for example), the letters after the numbers refer to modifications or versions. Generally the A is the first model and on up. Current C-130 production is the C-130J. There are lots of versions because it is a very versatile plane that has been in continuous productionn for almost fifty years. See GlobalSecurity's page on the 130.
The C-130A is long out of US military service, and in its last years of service it had a reputation for unreliability and safety issues even there. As early as 1983 or 1984 the USAF forbade the C-130As from transoceanic flight (at that time only two air guard were left using them). This was after at least one inflight breakup and one unexplained loss of a C-130A over the Caribbean Sea. You can recognise these machines on the ground, at least when they are standing still: unmodified C-130As are the only C-130s that have three-bladed propellers.
The AC-130 was an attack version of the basic cargo plane with guns that fire out the left side as the pilot circles the target. The first AC-130s were AC-130As which were made (about 1969/70) from C-130As that were obsolete as cargo planes! AC-130s are now AC-130E, AC-130H and AC-130J. It is a little confusing for AC-130 and C-130A to mean different things.
All USAF and Air Guard 130s are 130E and higher models. The Marines may still operate some KC-130Bs, I don't know, but they were replacing them.
Why do the fire guys fly C-130As? Simple. The USG has not released large quantities (if any) of the later C-130s. To friendly (?) foreign governments, sure, but not to private companies. There are 30 C-130As on the civil roster, almost all operated as fire fighting or aerial spraying craft. There is one NC-130B on the roster ("N" signifies a test and evaluation a/c and I believe this is operated by NASA).
The C-130As date from 1955-8 or so. That is not necessarily too old for an aeroplane (some WWII and Korean vintage B-24 Liberator/Privateers and B-26 Invaders are still used as fire bombers). The bigger problem is the special maintenance parts like generators and things are unique to the A model and hard to come by.
I hope I haven't told you all too much about C-130s and made your eyes glaze over.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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