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"Whirl-Mode" Phenomenon May Also Be At Play
When a Royal Air Force (RAF) Hercules crashed about 19 miles northwest of Baghdad on Jan. 30, the natural assumption was that it had been brought down by enemy action. The brass weren't so sure because it had spun down from an altitude that should have been above the range of a shoulder-fired missile. An opportunistic insurgent group released via al Jazeera a hastily cobbled-together video of flaming wreckage and a non-MANPADS (man-portable air defense system) missile being fired.
But that fraud quickly fizzled and the mystery deepened. Had a sapper or insurgent managed to place a device aboard? It seemed unlikely given where the aircraft had been and the security there. The inflight "explosion" had torn the right wing off near the root at medium altitude in the cruise, the right wing being found some considerable distance from the main wreckage. A senior RAF spokesman said, "sabotage is a distinct possibility but even though metal fatigue is another option, it's considered much less likely."
Less than two weeks later, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) announced that it was grounding 30 of its C130Es and placing another 60 C130Hs on restricted flight status. Some of the grounded aircraft were operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. The USAF's Air Mobility Command (AMC) had been monitoring cracks in the planes' wing box structure since 2001, but evidently the grounding decision hadn't been premeditated -- but was comparatively sudden. Inspections of the aircraft in the past four years have revealed that cracks "were greater in number and severity than originally expected," the AMC spokesman at Robins Air Force Base, Lt. Dustin Hart, said. Replacing the older planes with new J models is "one of the options," Hart said. Accordingly, on Feb. 10, Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, told U.S. senators the service was rethinking its plan to end purchases of C130Js, and he dismissed criticism of their performance, according to Reuters news service. The Pentagon has admitted that two other C130 crashes had been attributed to metal fatigue.
Stuff Of Legends Cracking
Air forces the world over would find it hard to do without the workhorse C130. Its presence in war zones and on humanitarian relief...