A B-1B Lancer made a wheels-up belly landing at Diego Garcia Monday,
skidding down the runway for 7,500 feet, according to Air Force reports. The
four-person aircrew escaped from the plane. The B-1B was home based with the
7th Bomb Wing, Dyess Air Force Base, Texas.
The 20-year-old bomber was landing at Diego Garcia, a remote base in the
Indian Ocean, at the end of a ferry mission that started at Andersen Air
Force Base, Guam. The Air Force won?t say why the crew landed the plane with
its landing gear retracted.
During the landing, the B-1B caught fire and emergency crews extinguished
the flames.
Because damage estimates are more than $1 million, separate Air Force
accident and safety investigation boards will look for the cause of the
accident.
cover story boys, it could have been going anywhere doing anything, or maybe just a ferry flight with faulty gear..... or u/s gear from a well placed quad 50 round whilst on a lowlevel ingress
Hey Retard...do you always tell folks to "shut up" on a second post? Nobody said they had faulty gear...I was saying if the gear WAS faulty, they'd have had it pinned....
Oh, and Methinks they forgot it...based on the simple fact, that a bomber that spends it's time loaded with nukes would surely have so many methods of lowering the landing gear, that it wouldn't very likely happen anyother way? I can see the headlines now...."B1B circles greater Chicago Area, Unable to Lower Landing Gear"....film at eleven!
Only reason I wish I was an american, so I could fly one of those bad boys....what a lovely machine, even when its all fucked up on the runway it still gets me hot.
ei ei owe wrote:Maybe it was an old crew from Canadian Global?
I'm not laughing at the boys from Canadian Global...because odds are it
could very well happen to ANYONE...it shouldn't but it can.
Your post caught me off guard and I laughed out loud because
'comedic timing' is a rare thing.
As you were.
BTW it is a beautiful aircraft. I hate seeing it like that. Those military boys
are big on check lists, double check and check again...and one more for
good measure.
By the cracky!! the boys kept er down the centre line, I hear they enlisted Wigwam Willy to salt the cL with ol dutch potatoey stuff. That kept the crew fixated and saved the day, way to go willy
i am sure a bird as such comes standard with some form of gpws or at the minimum off the shelf cessna gear horn etc blah blah. They did not forget. obviously.
battle damage man. They had to land there. Closest friendly base from where ever they were turning earth over, otherwise they would have kept airborne refuelling and come home. Intel missed that one little radar guided 20mm on their lowlevel exit and that little piece of depleated uranium made its mark and crippled its legs. Toss unused ordnance into the deep end of the ocean and put her down cuz she is injured.
Bubbaganoosh wrote:By the cracky!! the boys kept er down the centre line, I hear they enlisted Wigwam Willy to salt the cL with ol dutch potatoey stuff. That kept the crew fixated and saved the day, way to go willy
Methinks DC6driver is on to something...Now lets take a look at the news and see if some little town has recently suffered from an "earth quake". Actually they probably hit somewhere that Westerner's don't even know about because we're all to busy with Starbucks and SUV's.
I'd have to think that DC6 driver is probably right. It's possible that they had a mechanical issue whil in flight, but far more likely that something happened as a result of enemy action.
There is one thing that puzzle me though.
I'm not at all sure why they'd be flying at any level where tey were vulnerable to ground fire though. AFAIK current USAF practice is to keep B-1/B-2/B-52 at pretty high altitude. They are generally either delivering such massive amount of ordnance that precision is a moot point or delivering PGMs where altitude doesn't affect their accuracy. As long as the weapon is released into the appropriate "funnel" it will hit it's target.
As far as nukes go, not bloody likely that they'd be on board. This isn't the cold war anymore. It's been a long time since SAC flew constant patrols with nukes on board.
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I'm not at all sure why they'd be flying at any level where tey were vulnerable to ground fire though. AFAIK current USAF practice is to keep B-1/B-2/B-52 at pretty high altitude. They are generally either delivering such massive amount of ordnance that precision is a moot point or delivering PGMs where altitude doesn't affect their accuracy. As long as the weapon is released into the appropriate "funnel" it will hit it's target.
How many of the "aviation experts" commenting here get their knickers in a knot when CNN interviews an "aviation expert" regarding an incident or accident?
I'd be surprised if any user of AvCanada knows much more about the operation of a B-1b, let alone its mission profiles, than what is available to any other member of the public.
It's always a pleasure and enlightening to read stuff on here written by guys and girls who actually know something through experience. The rest is frequently bullshit.
This thread? I think I'll wait until at least there is more than an initial news report and a photo. But that's just me...
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Last edited by ch135146 on Sun May 28, 2006 10:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
I wasn't at all trying to suggest that the B-1B isn't capable of flying at lower altitudes...after all, that's what it was adapted to do when they changed the design from the B-1A. I was simply suggesting that in terms of stress on the airframe, demands on the aircrew, risk of flight into terrain, and vulnerability to small arms/HMG/light AA fire/MANPADS SAM, it would make a lot more sense to be dropping JDAMS and other PGMs (or carpet bombing where called for) from much higher altitudes.
I'd wager that B-1 crews still spend a lot of their training time on low-level high-speed training for operations in high-threat environments...but flying strikes into Iraq or Afghanistan following that mission profile just doesn't make a whole pile of sense. There may be a reason for them to fly their sorties at lower levels, but I can't think of one.
CH135:
I can't and won't attempt to speak for others here, but just because information is available to the general public doesn't mean that the general public has absorbed it. I can't count the number of times I've heard the media refer to assault rifles as machine guns, missiles as rockets, APCs/IFVs as tanks, and rockets as bombs. The fact that I haven't had access to classified documents about a specific aircraft/weapons system/etc. or haven't personally operated it doesn't mean that I haven't learnt more about it than the next guy. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king...and in the absence of a fully sighted individual, the one eyed man can see as much or more than anyone else.
You'll also note that I tend to couch any speculation I do with terms such as "I would wager", "AFAIK", or "I think". I tend not to state things as facts unless I actually know. When it comes to military aviation, I'm a relatively knowledgable enthusiast, and don't claim to be anything more. As far as infantry tactics and equipment go (and to a certain extent combat team level operations), I know my shit because I've been there.
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Please don't tell my mother that I work in the Oilpatch...she still thinks that I'm the piano player at a whorehouse.
Better enjoy this thread until the USAF complains and it is removed. After all, factual information must not be viewed or discussed if it paints the subject in a negative light.
