AJE - Libyan Air Force plane crashes

Source: Al-Jazeera

4.27pm: A Libyan airforce plane has crashed near Benghazi after the crew bailed out, the country's Quryna Newspaper reports. The newspaper said the crew had orders to bomb Benghazi, but refused to carry them out.


Read more: http://blogs.aljazeera.net/africa/2011/02/22/live-blog-libya-feb-23

and defected like the other 2 that did already.

Sheesh.

...seems strange that they would prefer to bail out as opposed to defect to Malta like the rest.

which has lots of risks.

Alternative theory: the plane malfunctioned, they were forced to bail out, and rather than face the wrath of Libyans on the ground, they chose the cover story of wanting to defect.

And as for your reasons, you are conjecturing without any basis of fact - i.e. making sh*t up.

Like the other pilots did?

as low as possible to avoid detection. Why? Possibly because they could be pursued and blown up.

One does not know what precautions have been put in place to prevent that from happening again.

So, possibly, this is conjecture, the pilots thought of something different to escape.

But one will never know until the full story becomes known.

Much of the desert is flat as a pancake.

They wanted to be out of the country.

if they wanted to be out of the country? If they had a functioning aircraft?

inexplicable behavior. Bailing out is dangerous. I just can't imagine a crew bailing out of a functioning aircraft if there are alternatives.

There could be multiple reasons why they did what they did.
Also, many are prepared to die for their country.

Crashing the aircraft had two outcomes - they were not bombing, and the aircraft could not longer bomb as well.

People often do not do rational things when under pressure.

Two air force pilots jumped from parachutes from their Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jet and let it crash, rather than carry out orders to bomb opposition-held Benghazi, Libya's second largest city, the website Quryna reported, citing an unidentified officer in the air force control room.

One of the pilots — identified by the report as Ali Omar Gadhafi — was from Gadhafi's tribe, the Gadhadhfa, said Farag al-Maghrabi, a local resident who saw the pilots and the wreckage of the jet, which crashed in a deserted area outside the key oil port of Breqa.

Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's long-standing ruler, has reportedly lost control of more cities as anti-government protests continue to sweep the African nation despite his threat of a brutal crackdown.

Protesters in Misurata said on Wednesday they had wrested the western city from government control. In a statement on the internet, army officers stationed in the city pledged "total support for the protesters".

Much of the country's east also seemed to be in control of the protesters, and an Al Jazeera correspondent, reporting from the city of Tobruk, 140km from the Egyptian border, said there was no presence of security forces.

"From what I've seen, I'd say the people of eastern Libya are the ones in control," Hoda Abdel-Hamid, our correspondent, said.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2011/02/2011223125256699145.html