troung

Video of Hercules air attack is 'bogus'

18:01 01 February 2005


A video purportedly showing the moment a British military airplane was shot down by Iraqi insurgents is almost certainly bogus, say defence specialists who studied the footage.
The Royal Air Force C-130 Hercules crashed 40 kilometres north-west of Baghdad at 1340 GMT on Sunday, killing all 10 military personnel on board. The plane is thought to have been carrying Special Forces troops to a base in the north of the country. On Tuesday, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed his "sympathy and condolences" to the families of those killed.

But the circumstances surrounding the crash remain hazy and on Monday the Arabic television station Al-Jazeera aired a video allegedly showing the aeroplane being destroyed by a missile.

The footage was supplied by an insurgent group calling itself the 1920 Revolutionary Brigade, which also claimed responsibility for bringing down the aircraft. The video shows a missile being launched by remote control followed by a mid-air explosion and images of aircraft wreckage on the ground.

Defence experts say the wreckage seen in the video shown is consistent with that of a Hercules C-130, but dismiss the rest of the video as a crude propaganda attempt.

Surface-to-surface
"I think the video is bogus," says Peter Felstead, editor of Jane's Defence Weekly. "The missile footage has just been grafted onto the front. And it looks like a surface-to-surface missile to me."

Jim O'Halloran, editor of Jane's Land-Based Air Defence, agrees. He says the pointed shape of the missile and the way it launched suggests it was a surface-to-surface Multiple Launch Rocket System missile, possibly the Katyusha type used by the Israeli army. He adds that such a weapon would not be effective against an airborne target. "What they're showing did not kill a C-130," O'Halloran told New Scientist.

But some of the wreckage footage itself may also be suspect, as it is shot in daylight. The airplane crashed at 1635 local time, leaving just an hour before sunset for someone to reach the wreckage and start recording. The images could not have been captured the following morning, as British forces had arrived at the site by this time.

Countermeasures
Even if the video is a fake, it still remains possible that the Hercules was brought down by a heat-seeking ground-to-air missile. Military officials say the debris from the plane was strewn over a large area, consistent with an explosion at approximately 4000 metres - the altitude at which the Hercules was known to be flying.

But several factors suggest the plane may not have encountered a missile at all. For one, Iraqi insurgents are not known to have access to such weapons. Secondly, the aircraft ought to have had numerous built-in countermeasures to combat heat-seeking projectiles, including infrared and radar detectors, decoy flares and a sophisticated infrared jamming system.

Felstead notes that heat-seeking missiles usually strike an aircraft's engine and destroy its wing. This often causes the plane to flip over and crash - leaving a relatively small area of debris on the ground.

He suggests that the plane may have suffered an onboard explosion, perhaps caused by a bomb or a fuel tank accident. "This seems more likely than something hitting it in the air," he told New Scientist.

However, Andrew Doyle, news editor at the aviation industry magazine Flight International, sounds a note of caution: "We're just not seeing enough evidence to say what happened at the moment."

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6950

----

Off on a big point, about the Iraqis not having SA-7/SA-14s. And the part about the Katuysha rocket like used by Israel is funny... they do use them but so did the old Iraqi army and he could have just said that and then debunked it as being able to do it...

But who really knows what happened? Accident or shoot down it don't really matter sadly...

lulldapull

Plus man the sadder part is that this idiotic 'Analyst' worked at Janes???

boy this Janes is looking worse now than the 15 year old islamic mulla kids at PDF! And katyusha used by Israeli's? or more like on the recieving end of them

I told you guys that the rocket looked like a single BM-21 type launched from a hastily prepared bipod launcher! Nothing more. That bizzare detonator/ trigger type fuse box also jives with that "Surface to surface" missile claim by Ansar...or now they are calling them some other group.