told NBC News<\/a>. \u201cHe was there for just a week.\u201d<\/p>\nSmith, who was also the father of a 2-year-old named Fletcher, had worked on projects at the base for 10 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did not see this coming,\u201d said Lauren Smith, 30, who had been married to her husband for six years. <\/p>\n
Lauren Smith, who worked on the base as a kindergarten teacher, said Monday\u2019s flight had originally been scheduled for Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey go through tons of safety things before they even take off,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I know specifically on Friday they had \u2014 they were gonna fly on Friday, and they just kept pushing it back and pushing it back.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I don\u2019t think that plane was ready to take off, and I\u2019m so sad it did,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Middleton, of Tehachapi, California, was a married father of two, according to an obituary provided by the military. <\/p>\n
A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, Middleton worked as a test pilot for Boeing and played the viola with the Tehachapi Symphony Orchestra.<\/p>\n
Watson, who hailed from Shreveport, Louisiana, was also an Air Force veteran and a weapons system officer.<\/p>\n
Rischar was a father of three and a flight test engineer with the defense contractor JT4. Like his grandfather and father, he was a civilian employee based at Edwards Air Force Base.<\/p>\n
Davis was also based at Edwards and was a weapons systems officer with the 419th Flight Test Squadron.<\/p>\n
The Stratofortress, which is a long-range bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons, was on a \u201croutine test mission\u201d when it suddenly went down, Air Force Col. James Hayes told reporters Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the swiftness of the crash after departure, the incident was declared unsurvivable,\u201d officials said in a statement.<\/p>\n
But they declined to speculate on what could have caused the catastrophic crash. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Accident Investigation Board process has formally commenced; these types of investigations can take up to six months for initial conclusions on the cause of the crash,\u201d the officials said.<\/p>\n
Nicknamed \u201cthe Buff,\u201d for Big Ugly Fat Fellow, the B-52 been the go-to bomber for the U.S. military since 1955, according to Air Force Global Strike Command.<\/a><\/p>\nEach plane costs $84 million and is manned by a crew of five, including an aircraft commander, a pilot, a radar navigator, a navigator and an electronic warfare officer.<\/p>\n
Edwards Air Force Base is in the Mojave Desert, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A pilot who played the viola. A young dad who just returned to work from paternity leave. A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-364796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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