Mourning the B52 crew

IYKYK. If you don't, then this wasn't intended for you

Gun owners buy and use Priuses too, fortunately for me anyway

 

Yeah... hitting the ignore button on your profile so I don't see you anymore... All you gun crazed freaks are vile and wretched and way more likely to die by suicide.

 

Getting put on his Ignore list is often a blessing.

 

+1

We may never know.
There were 8 beans aboard....meaning 3 pax, probably.
They were working out at Edwards on something with "testing" in the description - meaning probably 'Secret Squirrel' stuff.
Weather was CAVU.
There were the military equivalent of CVR/FDRs aboard.....but good luck getting those data.
Pretty senior people aboard that bird - eh?
I'm guessing that the NTSB isn't going to be investigating this one - although the three extra pax may be a wildcard.

The Buff is an extraordinarily safe bird, especially when you consider their age and the number of cycles they've amassed.

We'll see.

 

Some other article mentioned that it was in the air about 3 minutes, executed a 180 degree turn, and at the end was 'descending' about 5000/minute, much faster than it should, 'landing' on a parallel runway from where it took off. I believe these details were taken from a flight radar system, not from any visual witness.

 

Besides the ah.....interesting crew composition, the crash site is also interesting.
It didn't 'mush in' like most aircraft at speed.
What we see is a rather compact 'auguring in' suggesting a departure from flight from a stall or loss of pitch control.

If we knew everything the USAF folks know the clouds wouldn't get much thinner.
Scheduled flight duration?
Fuel load?
What was being tested?
How many cycles for this bird?
Lots of recent gripe sheets?
Any weapons aboard?

An all ossifer crew is ops normal for a BUFF.
The USAF rolls like that - sending officers, if not senior officers into harm's way while the enlisted stay behind, but two 05s and three 04s is a little interesting for a 5-bean crew, along with the three civilians - but probably not the stuff of a Tom Clancy novel.
They might have been testing anything from a new interphone system mod to a civilization (or drone) threatening death ray.

Probably closer to the former given the dearth of standers-by.