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A stall resulting in an unrecoverable spin brought down an MC-12 Liberty surveillance aircraft in Afghanistan on April 27, killing all four aboard, the Air Force announced today.
An Air Force Accident Investigation Board report states that the MC-12 stalled due to insufficient airspeed during a climbing left turn, which caused a left spiral. The crew was in a routine, left-turn orbit when they flew into cloudy conditions.
The weather impeded visibility and masked the horizon, according to an Air Combat Command release on the report. The crew tried to climb to an altitude with improved visibility when the stall occurred.
Killed in the crash were:
■ Capt. Brandon L. Cyr, 28, of Woodbridge, Va. He was assigned to the 906th Air Refueling Squadron at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.
■ Capt. Reid K. Nishizuka, 30, of Kailua, Hawaii. He was assigned to the 427th Reconnaissance Squadron at Beale Air Force Base, Calif.
■ Staff Sgt. Richard A. Dickson, of Rancho Cordova, Calif. He was assigned to the 306th Intelligence Squadron at Beale Air Force Base.
■ Staff Sgt. Daniel N. Fannin, 30, of Morehead, Ky. He was assigned to the 552nd Operations Squadron at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla.
The airmen were deployed to the 361st Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron with the 451st Air Expeditionary Wing at Kandahar Airfield.
The MC-12 is a modified version of the civilian Beechcraft C-12 Huron outfitted with surveillance cameras and equipment to fly intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The aircraft was destroyed in the crash at a loss of $19.8 million.
There were no civilian injuries and no damage to private property.
http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/30/th ... ndence-08/ isn't a boring read, as you can see below.Afghanistan
The Crash of Independence 08
How rushing an aircraft to war led to corner-cutting that killed four Americans
Sometimes, a 99.96% success rate isn’t good enough.
That’s how often the Air Force’s MC-12W Liberty spy planes arrive overhead when needed by U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
You might think that a mission aboard an unarmed propeller-driven plane, flying lazy orbits and trying to locate and video troublemakers far below, is a relatively simple task in skies filled with bomb-laden jet fighters and missile-firing helicopters.
But you would be wrong.
Even the most mundane-sounding mission can go haywire when the demands of war press a service to develop a needed capability quickly,
and to deploy less than optimally-trained pilots to the fight.
Seven seconds passed before the mission commander, sitting in the right front seat, spoke up.
“Alright,” he ordered the pilot, according to a snippet of chatter captured by the cockpit voice recorder detailed in the report, without emotion or punctuation.
“Firewall.” That was an order to push the plane’s throttles forward — “through the firewall” — and send more power to the propellers. “Max power, max power.”
This is where Independence 08 entered a perfect aerodynamic storm:
— To avoid the clouds, it was climbing.
— It was already making a left-hand turn, as part of its prescribed orbit.
— To fly the orbit, it was already banked to the left.
— The MC-12W’s props do not spin opposite one another, but in the same direction. Boosting their power tugs the aircraft to the left.
Two seconds after the mission commander called for “max power,” the plane banked at least 50 degrees to the left, setting off an alarm.
Four seconds later, the plane’s stall-warning horn sounded, signaling an imminent loss of lift. “Background noise,” the investigation notes, “indicates items flying around within the aircraft.”
At this point, the pilot’s display screen went blank, except for a series of red arrows, pointed upward.
“Whoa,” the pilot said. “Pull up.”
The airplane most likely had entered a dangerous spin on the verge of becoming a deadly spiral. But pulling up — as directed by the red arrows on the cockpit screen — would only make recovering from either more difficult.
“My aircraft,” the more experienced and senior mission commander said nine seconds later, asserting his right to take control of the plane as it plummeted toward the ground at 134 miles an hour.
“Your aircraft,” the pilot agreed three seconds later, just before the cockpit voice recorder stopped recording. A second indicator showed the plane was now falling at 282 miles an hour.
Five seconds later, the aircraft was diving at 326 miles an hour.
“Such rapid acceleration is indicative of an extreme nose-down attitude,” the Air Force investigation says.
Twenty seconds later, it had reached an estimated 364 miles an hour.
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