Witness Says Missile Caused US Helicopter Crash

The United States military was today investigating whether ground fire caused the crash of two U.S. helicopters, killing 17 American soldiers, the worst single loss of U.S. life since the start of the Iraq war.

Five soldiers were injured and one was missing after the Saturday crash.

The two Black Hawks, which belonged to the 101st Airborne Division, went down in residential neighbourhoods of Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city.

The spokesman for the 101st Airborne, Major Trey Cate, said the military was “trying to figure out what happened.... We are going to do a thorough investigation because if this either involved ground fire or it was safety-related, then ... we’re going to make sure we take precautions so it won’t happen again.”

The chief military spokesman in Baghdad, Col. William M. Darley, said the cause of the crash “will be under intense investigation today”.

A statement by the U.S. command said one helicopter was carrying a quick reaction force and the other ferried soldiers on a transport mission in northern Iraq. Cate said the quick response team was on its way to investigate a shooting incident in which a U.S. soldier was injured.

The statement did not give the cause of the crash.

MORE: http://www.news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2183370

The headlines are beginning to surface and CentCom will now relent and admit the cause.

CNNint'l is still not leading w/ this.

Since when does the largest USsoldier death due
to Iraqi forces take a backseat to
other news.

said one of the helicopters was hit on the tail by a rocket-propelled grenade. Witnesses said it then collided with another Black Hawk, and both crashed in a residential neighbourhood in the northern city of Mosul.

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=403935

The latest smear from Faux is that it was probably "pilot error." Faux is not the only network to ignore the eyewitness accounts that the first chopper was hit by a missile and that it then collided with the second chopper.

We don't want to upset the American people with stories that "peaceful" Mosul is becoming a hotbed of Resistance fighters.

this is a serious escalation of events here.. Ambush a foot patrol and wait for reinforcements(helo's loaded with soldiers) and ambush the helo's??

as of 10am Eastern

The neocons have the treasure chest
but they can't get the lid off.-Fisk

I predict USsoldiers will start fragging
WestPoint Lieutenants soon.
-"You want me to do what?-take a stripe, I don't care".
Part of Nam conversation between
grunt on the ground and col. in helo overhead
ordering grunt to advance.-Told to me
by the grunt.
(I still think an older friend of mine
was fragged in Nam).

...particularly unmindful of the Vietnam environment in which they found themselves. They liked doing stupid stuff like ordering frontal assaults on enemy bunkers. Those that didn't learn the lay of the land very, very quickly found themselves shot from the rear during a combat op, or blown up in their own tent.

Unhappily, this situation is going to get a lot worse before the troops get pulled out of that mess. Compounding the mess will be the start-up of the draft in 2005.

U.S. Copters Collide In Iraq, Killing 17
Pilot Tried to Evade Groundfire, Officials Say
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45959-2003Nov15.html
By Daniel Williams -- Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 16, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Nov. 15 -- Two U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters collided in midair Saturday and crashed into a residential neighborhood in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least 17 soldiers and injuring five others, the U.S. military said.

---snip---

Several witnesses contacted in Mosul also said the helicopters had collided, but one witness said at least one of the Black Hawks was hit by groundfire. The Reuters news agency quoted a U.S. officer at the scene as saying that a rocket-propelled grenade hit one of the helicopters. The crashes took place at about 6:15 p.m., when darkness had already fallen.

---snip---

"The Americans have closed off everything near the crash," said Bashar Darwish, a hotel employee in Mosul. Darwish said he saw one low-flying helicopter in flames before it hit the other. He said that there had been exchanges of fire between the choppers and someone on the ground, and that the Black Hawk on fire had erupted in flames after being hit.

He said the crash took place in the Sheik Fethi district on the city's west side. Another witness, Mohammed Badran, said one of the helicopters ascended abruptly and hit the second aircraft. Yezen Juburi, a businessman in Mosul, said that the helicopters simply collided.

and pentagon, no wonder I no longer believe a word they spout. Black hawk down now seems to be a weekly thing, where is the rightwing "outrage" now. Wonder when the movie is coming out?

in Korea/Medicare/LaGovernor/

oh andBTW-2Helos shot down after
US premier fighting force caught in Ambush.
Largest death toll since Invasion/occupation
began.
( Molok555 is reporting the actual way CNN is still covering
this Major news story).

In other news only 6 shopping weeks 'til
Christmas/Hannukah!

pilot was trying to evade ground fire AND leading with a 48-hour old bombing in Turkey and Israel's condemnation of it. They are international, after all...

Lured them in with a gorund ambush? Are we seeing the emergence of Mujihadeen tactics or even veterans?

That's what it sounds like, and that's why they don't want
to talk about it. It will be a very difficult tactic to
counter, so they don't want the idea to spread.

...troops ambushed in the initial patrol may not live long enough to be medevaced because the response will have to be much slower and deliberate to avoid the ground-to-air missile fire.

The Soviets found this tactic to be extremely demoralizing...aside from being captured and executed on video that was left behind with the body.

The Soviet's had there hand full with this kind of thing in Chechnya and now its coming to Iraq??

You'd hope we would have better counter-strategies, since we trained the mujahadeen in the first place.

...and that "eyewitness reports are often inaccurate."

Psy-war distortions never end. Bremer's statement considered more substantial than the report of a US officer on the scene.

When the last helicopter went down about 2 weeks ago, the US decided that all helicopters will now fly only at night with their lights off, so they can't be spotted.

This means that the resistance fighters have become very adept at targeting Black Hawks, even in the dark? I don't doubt that one of the helicopters was hit by a rocket.

We know the fighters have been on a learning curve and they've gotten quite knowledgeable in the past 5 months. But to hit an object in the dark, without its lights on?

Maybe the US better rethink this strategy.

...you can shoot it with a Stinger or any other missile that uses infrared or heat-seeking capabilities:

"In 1977, General Dynamics had begun full-scale development of a next-generation Stinger, designated XFIM-92B. This missile, also known as Stinger-POST (Passive Optical Seeker Technique), has a new microprocessor-controlled two-band (IR/UV) seeker head. The POST seeker uses rosette-pattern image scanning techniques, which allows it to distinguish more efficiently between the real target and IR decoys or background clutter. The FIM-92B was placed in limited production in 1983, alongside the continuing production of the FIM-92A Basic Stinger. FIM-92A/B production finally ended in 1987 after more than 16000 rounds."

Raytheon (General Dynamics) FIM-92 Stinger
<http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/stinger.htm>

The model described above was used extensively in Afghanistan against the Soviet choppers.

Great for Helicopters.

What annoys me is they should have seen this coming.
They keep trying to pretend the enemy are idiots until some
grunts get killed, and they they take corrective measures
that still assume the enemy is a bunch of idiots, like this
fly only at night rule.

Those choppers are sitting ducks, with hundreds of thousands of
RPGs and shoulder-launched SAMs floating around, and suckering
them with a distraction is the first idea that is going to come
to mind for somebody that wants to try them out.

Their defense contractor cohorts then get more
money to build more helos, which makes them happy
so they continue bribing Bush Inc.

And the human toll? Just a bunch of poor folk.
Eat all you want. We'll make more.
"Bring 'em on." - Resident Select George W. Bush, 2003

It's not supposed to be going like this.

The GOP/BFEE's speciality is voting fraud.
They wouldn't be in power in the first place if not for that.
Now they got Diebold et al on their side.
It's probably why they don't care about alienating any demographic,
including the traditionally Repug voting military folks.

I'm not saying to give up, I'm just saying there be
*massive voting fraud* in 2004. That's the biggest
issue right now. If we don't fight it, we won't even
get a crack at the other biggest issue: Campaign Finance Reform.

that the iraqis could have night vision goggles?

You can find the things in sporting goods stores.

and such easy targets, too. They are fragile, make lots of noise, low, and slow.

We should be transporting our soldiers in Bradleys.

The enemy is not stupid, making that assumption is a deadly mistake.

There's a COMEDY (yes... Comedy) that been getting re-run on HBO Signature and HBO Zone the last couple of weeks based on the true story of the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

I think it's called "Pentagon Wars." Kelsey Grammer and Cary Elwes are the stars.

Anyway... initially, when a Bradley got hit by live fire, it's aluminum armor caught fire and burned toxic fumes that would kill the crew and soldiers inside. They tried to sneak the Bradley through testing by using hideouly bad Romanian anti-tank weapons as supposedly representative of Soviet/Warsaw Pact weaponry in testing, filing the Bradley gas tanks with water, removing all ammo stored inside, and covering every surface in the vehicle not outwardly visable to testing supervisors with flame retardant.

Review wise... cool flick... 4 outta 5 stars. The scenes about the sheep to be used as live test subjects should be watched without a beverage. If you try to take a sip during one of these scenes, it's going out your nose.

Then it would be pretty easy for them to hit each other.

Pilots have the best night vision goggles available, and can see virtually like daylight with starlight. I spent a lot of time riding in Blackhawks and Hueys, and the thing that alweways impressed me was how damn good the pilots were. Flying through narrow canyons and stuff like that. Sure, it could happen (pilot errror), but military witnesses have stated that ground fire struck at least one bird. THERE IS an effort to make it seem like pilot error when that might not be the case.

...bothered by the fact that a GI is missing?

Is he still missing? I'm worried about a GI being captured and taken somewhere as a hostage.

I think the survivors were probably too badly injured to make good hostages. More probable is that he either wasn't on the helicoptor in the first place or was so badly incinerated that they're still looking for bits of body.

2nd-I would bet that over 80% of US
does not know that the US suffered its
greatest casualties of the war
this weekend.

3rd-that more in US would be aware of
Turkey bombings than 2 helos down.

4th-that they were shot down w/ RPG-7's
(hitting the rotor not the engine), maybe
3% of US.

5th-the retreat from Iraq will not be pretty.

the other, then as an aside they said that there were reports that one may have been avoiding hostile fire.

They must be getting massive pressure to avoid acknoledgement of a hit.

Reasons?

1. Troop morale. People won't be that happy to be transported in helocopters when they know they can be shot down by an enemy they can't see.

2. They don't want to "aid" the enemy by allowing them to know their methods are effective. Stupid, but I can see the mindset existing over there.