{"id":159873,"date":"2025-09-22T00:13:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T00:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/159873\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T00:13:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T00:13:10","slug":"today-in-history-september-22-unlikely-culprits-behind-downing-of-hi-tech-spy-plane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/159873\/","title":{"rendered":"Today in History – September 22: Unlikely culprits behind downing of hi-tech spy plane"},"content":{"rendered":"

O\ufeffne of the world’s most advanced military reconnaissance planes crashed on September 22, 1995, when it was hit by geese in Alaska, killing all 24 people aboard.<\/p>\n

The US AIr Force E-3 Sentry surveillance aircraft was brimming with high-tech equipment, but a combination of failures left it tragically exposed to a flock of geese.<\/p>\n

Events began when the four-engine jet, which has a distinctive giant radar dish, lined up on the runway at Elmendorf air base ready for take-off during a routine training flight.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/A US Air Force E3-B Sentry surveillance aircraft like the one that crashed in September 1995. (public domain)<\/p>\n

Ahead of it a military cargo plane had taken off and disturbed a flock of Canadian geese close to the runway.<\/p>\n

The Sentry rolled down the runway, and as it left the ground two jet engines sucked in some of the nearby birds triggering a catastrophic technical failure.<\/p>\n

The crew frantically began dumping fuel and began turning the plane left in a bid to return to the runway.<\/p>\n

But after reaching a height of about only 100 metres, the Sentry suddenly plummeted and crashed into a forest about two kilometres from where it had taken off, only 43 seconds before.<\/p>\n

Witnesses recall seeing a huge explosion and smoke. The 22 American and two Canadian defence personnel aboard all died instantly.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/The crash on September 22, 1995, killed all 24 people aboard. (US Air Force) (Wikipedia)<\/p>\n

Air crash investigators \ufefflater found feathers of geese among the wreckage and concluded a bird strike had caused the crash.<\/p>\n

They also pointed to failures by air traffic control in not warning the Sentry’s crew about geese on the airfield. \ufeff<\/p>\n

The disaster was a wake-up call for the US military and the wider aviation community about the danger of bird strikes.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon initiated non-lethal bird scaring programmes for its airfields, which included a robotic dog that ‘barked’ loudly.\ufeff<\/p>\n

Bird strikes continued after the Elmendorf tragedy, including the famous ‘Miracle of the Hudson’ in 2009, when a US Airways flight was miraculously ditched in New York’s Hudson River without loss of life after hitting geese.<\/p>\n

But other planes weren’t so lucky. South Korean investigators found a bird strike was behind last December’s crash of a Boeing 737-800 passenger jet in the country’s south-west that killed 179 people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"O\ufeffne of the world’s most advanced military reconnaissance planes crashed on September 22, 1995, when it was hit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-159873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}