"US military plane carrying three crashes in Kyrgyzstan" by Dalton Bennett | Associated Press, May 04, 2013
CHALDOVAR, Kyrgyzstan — An American military refueling plane carrying three crew members crashed Friday in the rugged mountains of Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian nation where the United States operates an air base key to the war in Afghanistan.
There was no word on the fate of the KC-135 crew as darkness fell and the search for them was suspended for the night. Cargo planes do not have ejector seats. Officials at the US base said they had no information yet on the cause of the crash.
The plane crashed at 2:55 p.m. near Chaldovar, a village 100 miles west of the US Transit Center at Manas base outside the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. Pieces of the plane, including its tail, were scattered across in a grassy field bordered by mountains.
Making what we saw in Pennsylvania on 9/11 and the official story very, very suspicious.
The plane was on a refueling mission for Afghanistan war operations at the time of the crash, a US defense official in Washington said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the details of an ongoing investigation.
The front section of the aircraft has not yet been found, Kyrgyz Emergencies Minister Kubatbek Boronov said. He said searchers also have not found the flight recorders from the plane, which was badly burned in the crash.
The search for the crew will resume Saturday morning and the crash site will remain under guard, Boronov said.
One resident of the agricultural and sheep-grazing area said the plane exploded in flight. ‘‘I was working with my father in the field, and I heard an explosion. When I looked up at the sky I saw the fire. When it was falling, the plane split into three pieces,’’ Sherikbek Turusbekov told a reporter at the site.
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The US base, which is adjacent to Manas International Airport outside Bishkek, was established in late 2001 to support the international military campaign in Afghanistan. It functions as an interim point for troops going into or out of Afghanistan and as a home for the tanker planes that refuel warplanes in flight.
The Manas base has been the subject of a dispute between the United States and its host nation.
In 2009, the United States reached an agreement with the Kyrgyz government to use it in return for $60 million a year. But the lease runs out in June 2014, and the United States wants to keep the base longer to aid in the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan is reluctant to extend the lease.
On Monday, a Boeing 747 cargo plane crashed just after takeoff from the US military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, killing all seven people aboard. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating that crash since it was on the Bagram air base.
What kind of crap is our military paying for?
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Also see: Bodies of two US crew found at Kyrgyzstan crash site
Related(?):
"Russian rocket crashes in Kazakhstan" by Andrew E. Kramer | New York Times Syndicate, July 03, 2013
MOSCOW — A rocket carrying Russian satellites but no humans veered off course and crashed a few seconds after liftoff Tuesday, sending a cloud of highly toxic orange fumes toward the Kazakh city of Baikonur only 50 miles away.
Fears that the toxic cloud would waft into Baikonur were eased later in the day, however, after heavy rains dispersed the fumes.
Photographs posted online had shown the ominous cloud stretching over buildings near the launching pad, and residents of Baikonur, population 70,000, had been instructed to stay indoors.
The Proton-M rocket rose just above its launching tower at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, wobbled, and then tipped over into the desert in a ball of fire.
The short flight Tuesday was the fourth Proton failure in three years, and it was sure to raise safety questions among NASA officials and Western commercial clients of Russia’s space services.
Well, you shouldn't have shut down the space program then.
In recent years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has relied on Russia to provide transportation for US astronauts headed to the International Space Station. But those space flights have used a Soyuz rocket that has a strong safety record.
The Russian space agency did not immediately offer an explanation for the crash.
There were no reported injuries at the site of the accident, an area that Russia rents for rocket launchings. But the short flight, instead of a journey to space, made for one of the most prominent rocket disasters in Russia’s space program in recent years.
“According to the preliminary estimates from the Russian side, there is no destruction and there are no casualties,” the Kazakh space agency, KazCosmos, said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The crash was another setback for the Proton rocket, a booster for the Russian space program that is used for commercial and military payloads.
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