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- Hacker News
- Why is stuff like this on Hackernews?by herbst
- Because a HN user posted the link and other HN users upvoted it.by TiredOfLife
- why present tense?by dmvjs
- It's common in news headlines when an event is very recent or a story is still developing. A report about, say, the US bombing a previously unreported site in Iran several weeks ago would be in the past tense "US bombed <site> in Iran". When the US bombs Iran today, it'll be titled "US bombs <site> in Iran".by Jtsummers
- you fly jets long enough something like this happensby blitzar
- A Russian bomber was seen nose diving today too.by 2OEH8eoCRo0
- Strictly speaking that was a Soviet bomber. The Russians ended up with them, but they can't make more of them, at least not right now.by m0llusk
- Is there something systemic behind these frequent incidents with military aircraft? It is using old, legacy equipment? Is it due to using rushed, streamlined procedures designed for war-time even outside an active battle environment? Are there just many, many military flights daily so statistically one will be in the news every couple weeks?
IMO the danger to US service members outside of combat seems way too high. It's a well known fact most fatalities occur during training than during combat. (Sure this due to there being many more training exercises than active combat engagements but from a policy perspective it is very worrying).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
- They are very rare these days compared to the 1950s-80. I presume it's a combination of aircraft design developing and also the scale of the military and the intense training during the Cold War.
Have a flick through these links listing losses or two RAF types, it's quite sobering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/harrier...
by Steve44 - I would guess that when you are training you are still doing activities that are not as safe as just traveling from point A to B: flying low, pointing the nose at the ground, landing a helicopter in a less than ideal spot (it seems like half of those are helicopters), etc. That hypothesis doesn't really apply well to transport planes or B52s though. Military pilots probably spend a higher overall fraction of their flying career as trainees?
- It's only notable now because of how safe aircraft are now and how rare these incidents are. Like, of the 116 B-58 Hustlers built, 24 were lost in crashes. Over 200 B-47's were lost during its service life, killing 464 crew members.
This is the first B-52 crash in almost 20 years.
- The US military has 10-15,000 airframes. The US military trains hard and flies a lot of hours so accidents and failures are not completely preventable. They explicitly plan to lose an average of 2 airframes per month due to attrition, which is roughly their historical average. The crew is able to escape most of the time.
It may seem odd that they plan for these losses but the optimal amount of risk is non-zero. Excessive safety-ism interferes with effective training and operations, which risks lives in other ways. They aren't reckless but over-prioritizing never risking a life in training would defeat the purpose of it and institutionalize behavior that is ill-suited for actual warfare where risk is unavoidable.
Statistically the military environment is quite safe, particularly for young males, relative to the median lifestyle in the US. That is true even in some war zones, ironically.
- F-18 went down the other day as well.by verzali
- And Tu-22M3 today as well. Not a good day for bombersby yread
- Statement put out by Edwards AFB, press conference scheduled for 4:15pm PDT.
https://www.edwards.af.mil/News/Display/Article/4517897/b-52...
by Jtsummers - Edwards Air Base is supposed to be testing new engines for the B-52J upgrade. I wonder if this test flight was part of that program.by undersuit
- Video of the 1994 B-52 crash at Fairchild Air Force Base:
- I don't understand the fascination with watching people die. I'd rather not, thanks.
- https://ktla.com/news/california/b52-bomber-crash-edwards-ai... - Another report, includes an image of the crash site and more than just two paragraphs.by Jtsummers
- Is this after cleanup? There's almost zero wreckage and if it was at takeoff it shouldn't have enough speed or descent angle to atomize.by kryogen1c
- I hope the crew are okay, but from the look of the aftermath and the fact there's no mention of the crew yet, I assume not all survived. Shortly after takeoff is one of the most challenging times for an incident. Low altitude, low-speed and full fuel means things can go very bad, very fast.by mrandish
- B-52 crew has to bail out, no ejection option.
- there are sadly all too many cases like this: the Concorde's last flight comes to mind. Just horrible.
RIP
- As a betting man… this is not survivableby yieldcrv
- It’s been confirmed that the entire crew perished, and sadly the max complement of eight was aboard.
RIP!
by Recurecur