Breaking - US military plane down ‘no nuclear material’

a reply to: Zaphod58

To me it looks like a shallow angle of impact as there is no real cratering...not too fast either or I would expect the black skid to be longer. So if it burned up that much I expect it was very full on fuel or had some really combustible cargo.

a reply to: RickyD

It could have been a fairly high speed vertical impact as they attempted to set down. Rotate the nacelles in an attempt to set down, lose power and free fall into the ground. That’s going to do a lot of damage, add a fire, and nothing is left.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Wouldn't that leave a crater of some sort?

a reply to: RickyD

Depends on what the ground underneath is like, and how fast they hit.

a reply to: RickyD

I have seen many instances where an airplane just pancakes onto the desert in a flat spin. No crater. More often than not the post-impact fire just reduces the wreckage to a blackened rubble pile.

By contrast, I have seen cases in which an airplane struck the ground in a high-speed, near-vertical dive and blasted a deep crater that looked like something on the lunar surface.

This was probably a relatively low speed mishap where the airplane dropped vertically from a low altitude. Fire did the rest.

I always hated flying in These things in Marines w their tendency to fall from the sky.....I'd rather jump out of a plane any day of the week

a reply to: Shadowhawk

That's what I was thinking either low and slow and full of fuel for an RTB. Skid is small and fire did a lot of work on the wreck. Being an osprey with vertical take off and landing it makes sense something happened during a decent.

a reply to: RickyD

Maybe they were making a practice landing, or a forced landing for some reason. I have heard that the Osprey is highly susceptible to ingesting dust that causes engine problems.