Officials sift through air crash debris
LEFLORE COUNTY: Military investigators picked through the still-smoking wreckage of a Marine Corps transport plane on Tuesday, trying to learn what caused the aircraft, part of a Reserve unit based in New York, to plunge into a soybean field in the Mississippi Delta, killing 16 service members.
The KC-130 plane burst into flames on impact on Monday afternoon, leaving a charred furrow in the otherwise idyllic, deep-green landscape of waving bean, corn and cotton plants along US Highway 82, and scattered fiery debris and bodies across farmland and rural roads.
Among the first witnesses at the scene was David Habig, a crop-duster pilot who flew low over the wreckage. “Lo and behold, all I see are bodies out in the bean field,” he said. “They were everywhere. It was horrific. I’d never seen anything like it.”
The plane, carrying 15 Marines and one Navy corpsman, belonged to Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 452, or VMGR-452, nicknamed the Yankees, a Reserve unit based at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York, the Marine Reserve said on Tuesday.
The flight, which took off from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina, was headed to Naval Air Facility El Centro in California and was transporting personnel and equipment, the Reserve said in a statement.
Six of the Marines and the Navy corpsman belonged to the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, said Maj Nicholas Mannweiler, a spokesman for the Marines’ Special Operations Command. The command, created in 2006, is the newest — and, at about 2,800 troops, the smallest — of the military’s elite special ops forces, along with the betterknown Navy Seals and Army Special Forces.
Maj Mannweiler said the Raiders were scheduled to conduct “routine” training in Yuma, Arizona, lasting a few days to a couple of weeks, for small teams preparing for deployment overseas. He would not comment on when or where they were to be sent, but that battalion is assigned to Central Command, which conducts operations in the Middle East, South Asia and Central Asia, including Afghanistan and Iraq.
The military did not publicly identify the dead, a step that usually takes place a day after families have been notified.
“Our focus remains on notifying and supporting the families while we conduct a thorough investigation into the cause of this tragedy,” said Gen Robert Neller, the Marine Corps commandant.
Military and local officials said the cause of the crash was unclear. The KC-130, a variant of the C-130 transport plane, is configured as a tanker for aerial refuelling of other aircraft, but it can also be used to transport troops and equipment. The plane has a standard crew of up to six people.
Recent reports have raised concerns about the upkeep of the military’s aircraft, citing a decline in operational readiness, but there has been no surge in accidents.
The last crashes involving any types of KC-130 operated by the US military were in 2002 — one in Pakistan and one in California. Monday’s crash was the worst military aviation accident in the US in recent years, but far from the worst in history: In 1952, a transport plane crashed near Moses Lake, Washington, killing 87 service members.