The Board of Inquiry into the loss of the Hercules C-130K XV206 on landing at Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan on the 24th of May last year (see here) has reported (pdf link). More documents are here. After much effort, and extensive exploration of all sorts of other options, the Board concluded that (as was blindingly obvious…
Read More Reading the Documents: XV206David Axe is out with the Queen’s Royal Hussars group again, and he is still in the grip of raging Brit Romanticisation Disorder. Please, enough with the Lawrence of Arabia stuff. Or, well, get a room, or a secluded tent at least. More seriously, he’s impressed by the tactics and the determination to keep the…
Read More BRD outbreak rages!OK, so our last fit seemed to have got results. The MOD had, it seemed, finally found the cash to give the RAF’s C130s the explosion suppressant foam in the fuel tanks that the Americans and Australians fitted 40 years ago, after the loss of XV179 on election day in Iraq and an unprecedented campaign…
Read More Foam Party: We’re Going to Lashkar GharInformation has reached me that some progress may have been achieved about the C-130 Defensive Aids Suite, and specifically about the foam in the fuel tanks that might have saved the crew of XV-179 on election day in Iraq. Apparently the K fleet (super-E in US parlance, CMk1 in UK officialese) are getting their foam…
Read More Foam Party!They lie, they lie, they lie lie lie. We already knew that, but this is rather surprising in its sheer bare-arsed obviousness. Apparently, when Bush made his speech blathering about those “suspected mobile biological weapons labs” that turned out to be for filling weather balloons, the US government already knew from their own investigation of…
Read More Liars, Liars, LiarsBig media pick up a bit on the Hercules defensive-aids suite story (see here and here). Not much dig-in, though. This is just the latest in a sea of bullshit – there are 9 out of 25 RAF C-130s that have the full fit of defensive gear, including some really clever stuff like the Directional…
Read More DAS AgainYou may remember the shooting down of the RAF Hercules aircraft XV179 on election day, 2005, in Iraq. This blog ran quite a lot of stuff about it – some reasonable, some utterly ludicrous speculation. In the event, it turned out that the plane really was involved in special forces support (contrary to my scepticism…
Read More A Slight Return to XV-179