Thread: Chilean C130 lost on flight to Antarctic.

Chile missing C-130 plane: Floating debris found Chile missing C-130 plane: Floating debris found - BBC News

Interesting that satellite information was provided by the USA, and .......Israel. Curious that Israel would have a satellite monitering Antarctic waters. Unless it was a joint project.

Kind of like Pine Gap in Oz, Bob. Israel may have had visibility of the satellites at the time the photos were taken, so they were given credit. Just theorising...

Or maybe had the photo interpretation 'resources' available to help analyse what must have been a vast amount of satellite data.

Deano

Originally Posted by Hugh Jars

Kind of like Pine Gap in Oz, Bob. Israel may have had visibility of the satellites at the time the photos were taken, so they were given credit. Just theorising...

Never thought of that. Makes it a bit clearer.

Very strange. How do you crash a C-130 anywhere, never mind over the ocean?

There are a multitude of ways, but over Drake Passage I would think that weather would be the number one suspect, perhaps resulting in structural failure - the lack of a distress call would suggest something sudden happened.

Or it could be something as simple as an error in altitude resulting in hitting the water. It would not be the first time a flight crew has made a 10,000ft error - I seem to remember a flight from the US west coast to Honolulu many years ago on a dark night descended to 10,000ft and noticed water hitting the windscreen, switched on the landing lights, and found they were skimming the wave tops. I assume that the area where it was lost did not have secondary radar coverage.

Plenty of room for speculation. Going to be difficult to find what happened unless the data recorder is located - do military C-130s actually have one? And that will not be easy to find. This is one of the most difficult bits of ocean there is to do anything. And look how long it took to find the Air France plane in the Atlantic, in a much more benign environment.

This is not a Cessna 172 that old mate went for joy flight in.
It is a well proven military aircraft operated by experienced crews over a well known route. Reports indicate that the weather was clear or they would not of taken off, and it is summer time after all.

Having been personally involved in a crash with loss of life I am the last one to speculate. There is a big difference between speculation and discussion of possibilities. The few reports that are posted seem to indicate that the aircraft hit the water at a high rate of decent, as shown by the fuel tank foam debris. The fuel tanks(several) are located in the wing structure, so the wing would have to disintegrate to release the internal tank foam.

There is no radar coverage in that area, and communication is evidently restricted to HF radio.

As I posted: strange! RIP the poor buggers involved.

c-130.jpg