Thursday - February 19, 2009

Not Friendly, Not an Accident

A GRENADE being carried by a police officer accidentally detonated as a plane was on the tarmac, tearing the plane in two.
COLOMBIA’S military and law enforcement agencies suffered two airplane mishaps today including a plane blown apart on the tarmac by a grenade in the luggage.

The National Police plane was left cut in half on the tarmac of the Olaya Herrera airport in Medellin, Colombia’s second largest city, and a notorious center of the international drugs trade.

According to a police spokesman, a grenade carried by an officer that was boarding the plane accidentally exploded.  It wounded eight officers of the 27 that were on board but there are no further details of their injuries.

Also today a Colombian air force intelligence aircraft with a crew of five or six crashed near the northwestern town of La Dorada.  The fate of the crew was not immediately known, a military source said.

“We have had an accident with an AC-47 plane with the plate number FAC 1670 which was on a training mission and crashed’’ just outside the town, the source said. As to the crew “we do not know what their fate is,’’ the source added.

update: all five crew members were killed, and the plane utterly destroyed.
The FAC Commander, General Jorge Ballesteros discarded the accident to have been caused by a “terrorist attack” and he affirmed that the plane was “flying over a region controlled by the authorities so there is not any possibility of an attack from groups outside the law.”

The plate number on the aircraft pictured is PNC-0211, which shows it belongs to the cops. My bright eyed aircraft savvy readers are staring at that picture ... thinking “gosh, that nose looks mighy familiar, but not the engine nacelles or the tail, but I’d know that spooky wing shape anywhere.”

And they would be right. Once upon a time, let’s guess about 1944, the airplane in the picture was a C-47. Upgraded and modified, some became the AC-47 “Spooky” gunship that served in Vietnam. When that conflict was over, and Uncle Sam decided that that gunship role could be better filled by modified C-130 aircraft, the Spookys were sold off. Columbia bought some. About half a dozen I think. They became ghosts ... known locally as Avion fantasma (ghost planes), and fitted with FLIR. They seem to have both intelligence gathering and ground suppression roles, and they kept right on flying.

Years go by ... in 1993 Colombia built some more. In 2005 Columbia paid $7.1 million to have Basler Turbo do a modernization and a refresh or two, and some of the planes emerged as upgrade AC-47s, and some as “new” model BT-67s. That’s the broken airplane in the picture. Bigger modern turboprop engines, lengthened fuselage, improved control surfaces and a wing edge redesign. Bigger, stronger, faster, longer. The Colombian Police have 2. Had 2, until today. Now they have 1. Wiki has a pic of a sister BT-67 aircraft.

So, two carefully kept aluminum WWII veterans brought down today. Both aircraft had been valiant fighters against leftist rebels and drug traffickers for ages. But both were accidents, and it’s mere coincidence that out of 8 aircraft like them in the entire country, 2 suffered fatal mishaps today.

I don’t think so Tim.

If I were the US Government, I’d be watching the skies over Columbia really carefully for the next few weeks.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/19/2009 at 10:15 PM   
Filed Under: • Crime • War On Terror •  
• Comments (6) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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