#6 Another report from Delaplane:
June 29, 2005
Aircraft Down
A helicopter has gone down near the Pakistan border. This has already been on the news, but there are some inaccuracies being reported.
This is not a "Big Windy" Chinook, all of our Task Force Sabre friends are in Blackhawks and Apaches, and all of our LTF folks are on the ground.
There's not much more that can be said right now except that, as Fox News reports, there is reason to believe that this is still a rescue mission.
There are some very urgent and difficult actions underway right now and our continued prayers are with these folks.
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IF, if a 47 was used for emergency reasons,
Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, who attributed the loss of the Chinook [the last one] to the high altitude, noted that "the helicopters are right up against their operational capabilities."
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld echoed Myers during a press conference when he said, "these helicopters are not really designed to fly at those altitudes."
"Big Windy"? huh |
All 16 U.S. troops on a special forces helicopter were killed when the chopper was shot down by insurgents, the U.S. military said Thursday after rescuers recovered the bodies from the wreckage in a mountainous ravine. The MH-47 Chinook helicopter went down Tuesday in eastern Afghanistan while ferrying troops to a battle against militants — the deadliest single blow to American forces who ousted the Taliban in 2001 for harboring al-Qaida and are now grappling with an escalating insurgency. "At this point, we have recovered all 16 bodies of those servicemen who were onboard the MH-47 helicopter that crashed on Tuesday," Lt. Gen. James Conway, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. The dead on the helicopter included eight Navy SEALs and eight Army air crew, a U.S. official said in Washington. Authorities initially reported 17 people were on board, but the manifest included a person who apparently missed the flight, military officials said.