CNN) — All four airmen on board an Air Force C-17 were killed when the cargo plane crashed during a training mission near Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska on Wednesday, the Air Force reported Thursday. The names were being withheld, pending notification of next of kin.
The aircraft, assigned to the 3rd Wing at the base, crashed about 6:14 p.m. local time, Air Force Capt. Uriah Orland said.

In a statement Thursday, 3rd Wing commander Col. John McMullen said, “Our deepest sympathy and sincerest condolences go out to the family and friends of those airmen killed in this crash. Yesterday, we lost four members of our Arctic Warrior family and it’s a loss felt across our entire joint installation. Right now, our immediate focus is on providing all possible support to the loved ones of our fallen aviators. We are also engaged in a deliberate investigative process.”
Gov. Sean Parnell issued a statement expressing his sympathy for the crash victims.
“Alaskans are very connected to the military and our thoughts and prayers are with Alaska’s Air Force family,” Parnell said.

A board of officers will investigate the accident, Orland said.

Go to Source

An unmanned plane crashed through a perimeter fence at Cannon Air Force Base Wednesday morning before coming to rest in a nearby cornfield.

There were no injuries, according to a statement from Cannon.

Cannon officials said the plane was an MQ-1 B Predator assigned to Cannon’s 3rd Special Operations Squadron.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) reportedly taxied off the base runway, crashing before it got airborne.

The aircraft was carrying practice munitions that posed no threat, Cannon stated in a press release.

The crash occurred off of N.M. 467 just east of Cannon’s south perimeter gate, also known as the Portales Gate.

Curry County Undersheriff Wesley Waller said deputies were called to assist Cannon personnel around 8:30 a.m. but left shortly because base personnel had the situation under control.

Joe Black said he was contacted by sheriff’s deputies just after 8:30 a.m. and went out to the crash site. Black manages the farm for owner Art Schaap.

Black said there were base emergency response vehicles on scene and hazardous materials personnel in protective clothing cleaning the area.

“It looked like they had it pretty well under control,” Black said.

He said he didn’t see any fluid leaks and there was no significant damage to crops or nearby irrigation equipment.

“It was approximately 20 to 30 feet from our pivot system … (the damage) was just their fence and probably a little bit of road work that will have to be done,” he said. “But it was okay, everything’s going to be okay.”

Black said in eight years working on the farmland near the base, “we see a lot of planes every day go over,” but he has never seen an aircraft crash in the area before.
Cannon personnel are continuing to recover debris.

Cannon Spokesman Elliott Sprehe said the cause of the crash is unknown and more information will be released as it becomes available.

Go to Source

Washington (CNN) — The Pentagon is focusing on jailed Army Pfc. Bradley Manning as the main suspect in the leak of tens of thousands of secret U.S. military documents related to the war in Afghanistan, a senior Pentagon official told CNN Wednesday.

Manning, 22, is believed to have accessed a worldwide military classified internet and e-mail system to download tens of thousands of documents, according to the official, who did not want to be identified because of the ongoing criminal investigation of the soldier.

The FBI is assisting in the investigation as well, its director, Robert Mueller, said Wednesday.
“We’re currently supporting the (Defense Department) investigation into that leak, and to the extent that DOD needs our assistance or we can be of help we are providing that support at this juncture,” Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I can’t say as to where that particular investigation will lead.”

The Pentagon official said investigators now believe Manning logged into a system called the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, which essentially provides military members who have appropriate security clearances access to classified e-mails and the military’s classified internet system. But the official emphasized passwords and other control measures such as physical access are needed to log onto specific systems that provide information classified at the highest levels.

Pentagon officials have said for the past several days that so far the only material they have seen on the website WikiLeaks.org is classified at the “secret” level, a relatively low-level designation that allows for a large number of military personnel to access the information.
Video: Pentagon has ‘main suspect’ in leak

The senior Pentagon official told CNN that for now, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is relying on the Army criminal investigation into Manning and the leaks to determine how it happened and what might need to be done to prevent future cases.
“The secretary is determined to get to the bottom of this,” the official said.

The editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has refused to say where his whistle-blower website got about 91,000 United States documents about the war. Some 76,000 of them were posted on the site Sunday in what has been called the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War.

Pentagon officials have not found anything top-secret among the documents, a Defense Department spokesman said.

“From what we have seen so far, the documents are at the ’secret’ level,” Col. David Lapan said Tuesday. That’s not a very high level of classification.

Lapan emphasized that the Pentagon has not looked at all of the papers published on WikiLeaks.
President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he is “concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information” about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan but asserted that the documents don’t shed much new light on the war.

Manning was charged in June with eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code for allegedly illegally transferring classified data, reportedly including an earlier video that wound up on WikiLeaks.org. The private had top-secret clearance as an intelligence analyst for the Army when he was stationed in Iraq.

READ THE FULL STORY AT CNN HERE

Go to Source

Washington (CNN) — A former State Department analyst was sentenced to life in prison Friday for spying for Cuba for almost 30 years.
His wife and partner in spying received a sentence of six years and nine months, but will get credit for more than a year already served.

Kendall Myers, 73, pleaded guilty last November to conspiracy to commit espionage and wire fraud. His wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 72, admitted to one count of conspiracy to gather and transmit national defense information.
Kendall Myers’ life sentence does not include the possibility of parole.
In a prepared statement, Myers said he and his wife never wanted to harm Americans.”

We wish to add at this time that we acted as we did for 30 years because of our ideals and beliefs,” he said. “We did not seek nor receive payment for our work. We did not act out of anger at the United States or from a feeling of anti-Americanism. Nor did we ever intend to hurt any individual Americans. Our overriding objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution. We also hoped to forestall conflict between the two countries.”

“We share the dreams and ideals of the Cuban revolution,” he added. “We are equally committed to helping the struggling people of the world, whether they are here at home or abroad.”
As part of their sentences, the couple also agreed to pay the government more than .7 million, a figure matching Kendall Myers’ estimated salary over the years while working for the U.S. government and secretly spying for Cuba.
The two were arrested in June 2009 after meeting several times with an undercover FBI agent to whom they admitted their activities on behalf of Cuba. Those meetings were captured on video and audio tape.

Court documents painted an intriguing picture of a couple motivated by admiration for Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. They used code names. Kendall Myers was known as Agent 202. Gwendolyn Myers used the names Agent 123 and Agent E-634.
They used a shortwave radio to communicate from their District of Columbia home with their Cuban handlers. The couple also admitted they met Cuban agents on overseas trips to various places, including Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina.
Kendall Myers worked at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and later at the department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He received a “top secret” security clearance in 1985.

According to court documents, Myers told the undercover FBI agent he usually took information from the State Department by memorizing it or taking notes, and upon occasion he actually took classified documents home. Gwendolyn Myers said she would process the information to be delivered to their Cuban intelligence handlers.

At the request of the defense, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton agreed to recommend the Myerses serve their time in facilities near one another to make it easier for family members to visit them. The Bureau of Prisons will make the ultimate decision on that.

Go to Source

A photo taken by a resident in Hangzhou shows an unidentified flying object hovering over Hangzhou, capital of East China’s Zhejiang province, late Wednesday, July 7, 2010. (Photo: Metro Express)

ABC NEWS:

An unidentified flying object (UFO) forced Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou, China to cease operations on July 7. A flight crew preparing for descent first detected the object around 8:40 p.m. and notified

A UFO in China’s skies forced Xiaoshan Airport to cease operations for one hour.

Eighteen flights were affected. Though normal operations resumed an hour later, the incident captured the attention of the Chinese media and sparked a firestorm of speculation on the UFO’s identity.

UPDATE: Aviation experts are expected to complete late Friday their investigation into an unidentified flying object that disrupted air traffic over east China for an hour on Wednesday.

An investigation team, comprising police and aviation officials, are still trying to identify the UFO that was located over Zhejiang Province.

“No conclusion has yet been drawn,” said Wang Jian, head of air traffic control with Zhejiang branch of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, told Xinhua Friday.

Media have reported speculation that the UFO might have been a private aircraft, based on the increasing number of privately-owned aircraft in the province.

But an industry insider who declined to be named Friday ruled out the speculation as “too unprofessional” without giving further explanation.

Wang Jian said the private plane was “just a guess.”

Xiaoshan Airport in the provincial capital of Hangzhou was closed after a UFO was detected at around 9 p.m. Wednesday, and some flights were rerouted to airports in Ningbo and Wuxi cities.

Go to Source

Discovered this amazing looking well-worn C-5 Galaxy that flew into Amarillo some time during the wee-hours last night. I think it was here to pick up (or deliver) V-22 Osprey fuselage (or parts) to the Bell/Boeing plant here in Amarillo.

I hope you like this shot - because I literally went through hell to get it. I was attacked my a squadron of blood-sucking mosquitos (lying in wait in the open airport field) that ambushed my bare legs.

I think I lost a pint or two trying to get this shot just right!

LINK

(C) Steve Douglass

Go to Source

Taliban terrorists have a secret weapon to destroy the infidel American enemy — monkey marksmen.
According to The People’s Daily in China, the Taliban in Afghanistan is “training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops.

The newspaper’s bizarre story says the Islamic insurgents have drafted macaques and baboons to be all that they can be, arming them with AK-47 rifles, machine guns and trench mortars in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The monkeys, being rewarded with bananas and peanuts, are being turned into snipers at a secret Taliban training base.

The newspaper says “photos have been widely spread by media agencies and Web sites across the world.”

One of those sites is the Pakistan Defense Forum, which has pictures of gun-toting monkeys, and makes the wild claim that a monkey-soldier program was first launched by the CIA in Vietnam.
“Today, the Taliban forces have given the American troops some of their own medicine,” The People’s Daily said.

Go to Source

US aerospace mammoth Boeing yesterday rolled out its “Phantom Eye” unmanned strato-plane, able to cruise high above the airlanes for up to four days - powered by two ordinary Ford car engines running on hydrogen.

“The program is moving quickly, and it’s exciting to be part of such a unique aircraft,” said Drew Mallow, Phantom Eye program manager, in a statement issued yesterday. “The hydrogen propulsion system will be the key to Phantom Eye’s success. It is very efficient and offers great fuel economy, and its only byproduct is water, so it’s also a ‘green’ aircraft.”

To be specific, the Phantom Eye uses 2.3 litre four-cylinder engines of a type normally found in some models of petrol-burning Ford Fusion, turbocharged and tweaked so as to run on hydrogen at 65,000 feet.

Four days would suggest pretty good fuel economy, right enough. However “green” is a bit of a stretch as hydrogen at the moment is normally made by reforming natural gas. This releases copious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere - usually more than one would generate by running an ordinary fossil-fuelled car engine - so it is hardly green*.

One might also quibble with the “moving quickly” description of Phantom Eye. True, Boeing announced that it would start work on the Eye only in March, which would suggest impressive speed by the Phantom Works engineers.

In fact, however, the company has been touting Ford-powered high altitude drones for several years now. Indeed, back in 2007 it managed to get some military development cash for the previous “Orion” single-engined version, which could also stay up for four days. At that time, Boeing considered that a twin-engined job along Phantom Eye lines would be good for 10 days, not four - though the firm seems to have walked back on that somewhat.

Phantom Eye, then, hasn’t appeared with lightning swiftness: though one might excuse the Phantom Works engineers for that. The event which actually got the ball rolling again on the Phantom Eye was Boeing’s decision to provide development cash itself, having failed to get any from government customers. Lately, companies such as General Atomics have won a lot of government UAV business by offering finished products rather than insisting on taxpayers furnishing development money up front.

The next move for Phantom Eye is shipment to NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. It’s expected to make its first flight next year.

Go to Source

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) — Villagers in eastern Afghanistan repelled an insurgent attack Tuesday, an incident that left an Afghan civilian and “numerous” Taliban dead, the NATO-led command said.
The incident took place in Ghazni province, where Taliban fighters tried to attack the village of Aalai Shahea. After unsuccessful attempts to overpower the village, they were “met with effective resistance” by its residents and quickly left the scene, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said in a statement.

The event is one in a series of examples of villagers withstanding and repelling insurgent attacks, including the successful defense of a village in the Gizab district in southeast Afghanistan in April that resulted in several insurgent deaths and four arrests, the statement said.

The insurgents traveled from neighboring Uruzgan province to conduct Tuesday’s attack on the village, which is largely populated by Afghan security forces and their families, ISAF said.
“Attacking local people in their houses and villages demonstrates how desperate the Taliban have become in their failing operations to terrorize the Afghan people, and today the villagers fought back and won,” said Maj. Paul Oliver, a military spokesman.

Go to Source

Captured these two new helicopters (Cobra AH1Z and UH-1Y) coming in after a test flight today (here in Amarillo) to the Bell/Textron plant.

Enjoy!

-Steve Douglass

Go to Source