A U.S. Air Force ground crew inspects an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet at Bagram air base, some 31 miles north of Kabul, on Aug. 10, 2009. Manan Vatsyayana / AFP / GettyBehind An Afghanistan Plane Crash: Missed Signals -- Time Magazine
Soldiers talk about rampant confusion amid mud and blood on the battlefield, but the picture is not always that much clearer thousands of feet above the fray. Sometimes, even when everything aboard a $50 million fighter jet works perfectly, the stresses of combat, accumulating slowly and insidiously, can overcome the world's best pilots. That's what happened on July 18 over eastern Afghanistan, when two Air Force officers stumbled into a series of missed signals and blown procedures. The errors combined to send their F-15E screaming into a dark mountainside in a steep, controlled dive at 550 m.p.h., according to an Air Force investigation released last week.
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My Comment: Our prayers are with the families and their love ones.