US Air Force B-52 bomber crashes after takeoff, Edwards Air Force Base says

dmvjs

why present tense?

qq66

They stopped making the B-52 64 years ago. The US military is depending on planes that are simply too old and need to be refreshed.

optimalsolver

Video of the 1994 B-52 crash at Fairchild Air Force Base: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2OIxo00UeM

Jtsummers

https://ktla.com/news/california/b52-bomber-crash-edwards-ai... - Another report, includes an image of the crash site and more than just two paragraphs.

mrandish

I hope the crew are okay, but from the look of the aftermath and the fact there's no mention of the crew yet, I assume not all survived. Shortly after takeoff is one of the most challenging times for an incident. Low altitude, low-speed and full fuel means things can go very bad, very fast.

verzali

F-18 went down the other day as well.

2OEH8eoCRo0

A Russian bomber was seen nose diving today too.

KingMachiavelli

Is there something systemic behind these frequent incidents with military aircraft? It is using old, legacy equipment? Is it due to using rushed, streamlined procedures designed for war-time even outside an active battle environment? Are there just many, many military flights daily so statistically one will be in the news every couple weeks? IMO the danger to US service members outside of combat seems way too high. It's a well known fact most fatalities occur during training than during combat. (Sure this due to there being many more training exercises than active combat engagements but from a policy perspective it is very worrying). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

blitzar

you fly jets long enough something like this happens

Jtsummers

Statement put out by Edwards AFB, press conference scheduled for 4:15pm PDT. https://www.edwards.af.mil/News/Display/Article/4517897/b-52...

hagbard_c

It seems to be a bad day for strategic bombers with a B-52 down in the USA while a Russian Tu-22M3 'Backfire' went down in Irkutsk: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russian-s...

undersuit

Edwards Air Base is supposed to be testing new engines for the B-52J upgrade. I wonder if this test flight was part of that program.

herbst

Why is stuff like this on Hackernews?