Uganda Peoples Defence Force (UPDF),

I AM EMBARRASSED. I NEED TO TAKE SOME DAYS OFF

Spartan wrote:I AM EMBARRASSED. I NEED TO TAKE SOME DAYS OFF

@Spartan

Spartan wrote:I AM EMBARRASSED. I NEED TO TAKE SOME DAYS OFF

No call for that bro Spartan. Sheit does sometimes happen in this business and you know it sang well.

We wait and learn. Is all there is to it.

Spartan wrote:I AM EMBARRASSED. I NEED TO TAKE SOME DAYS OFF

Well, accidents do happen. We all needed those choppers in the war front. It is sad that they crashed, but it is good that nobody lost a live. Machines can be replaced. They must have strayed from the flight path.

Are the Hinds still repairable or they are finished

These things happen Spartan, we are comrades here and i know the KDF too feel like they have lost some of their own. Poleni

The more important question in my humble opinion is whether they were airworthy. Let alone capable of being deployed in theater. Lives may have been unintentionally saved by this mishap.

cylon wrote:Are the Hinds still repairable or they are finished

Fabrizio wrote:The more important question in my humble opinion is whether they were airworthy. Let alone capable of being deployed in theater. Lives may have been unintentionally saved by this mishap.

cylon wrote:Are the Hinds still repairable or they are finished

I hear they were airworthy refurbished by Amisom money.. Helicopter must have had an underlying problem that was missed

Fabrizio wrote:The more important question in my humble opinion is whether they were airworthy. Let alone capable of being deployed in theater. Lives may have been unintentionally saved by this mishap.

cylon wrote:Are the Hinds still repairable or they are finished

Hey, look here guys, you will all recall that we lost a brand new chopper ( a Z-9 ) over Liboi at the start of hostilities where sadly we also lost our gallant brothers in arms. Accidents do occur. Let's not speculate too much. This was a flight over or around Mt Kenya an area notorious for this especially during bad weather which at times is quite unpredictable over there. These were refurbished choppers and i have every reason to believe that the Russians did a good job on them. Remember too the brand new chopper that killed Saitoti and Ojode. Sometimes things happen which leaves us all bewildered.

Good to dispel some speculation:-

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2012-08/14/content_15674048.htm

Wreckage of Uganda helicopters found

"...one of the helicopters was burnt and the other was seen overturned...fate of the crew ...unknown..."

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Wreckage+of+Uganda+helicopters+found/-/1056/1478798/-/bkxsrwz/-/index.html

where is brother spartan and flying crane?
we need them to give us their perspective
we need to know if this was a premature deployment to the front line an IL prepared crew or just an unfortunate accident.
did the crew really understand the limitations of the aircraft's?
it seems they attempted to overfly the mountain which is too high, run into bad weather much like the famous Nevada triangle in America where freak winds can cause aircraft to suddenly crash while trying to fly over the mountains



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240240/Nevada-triangle-caused-Steve-Fossett-crash.html

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-mystery-of-the-nevada-triangle/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1

Olekoima wrote:

Fabrizio wrote:The more important question in my humble opinion is whether they were airworthy. Let alone capable of being deployed in theater. Lives may have been unintentionally saved by this mishap.

cylon wrote:Are the Hinds still repairable or they are finished

Hey, look here guys, you will all recall that we lost a brand new chopper ( a Z-9 ) over Liboi at the start of hostilities where sadly we also lost our gallant brothers in arms. Accidents do occur. Let's not speculate too much. This was a flight over or around Mt Kenya an area notorious for this especially during bad weather which at times is quite unpredictable over there. These were refurbished choppers and i have every reason to believe that the Russians did a good job on them. Remember too the brand new chopper that killed Saitoti and Ojode. Sometimes things happen which leaves us all bewildered.

This is true, accidents do happen, but look at the odds and you will see something does not add up. The question is why did the chopper that made it all the way to Garissa(or Wajir or Somalia since the story is not clear) have to make a crash landing too? Was the weather in Garissa/Wajir/Somalia bad too? Why didn't the surviving chopper make an SOS call that the other 3 choppers had gone down or lost COM?

Who fueled the choppers at LAB and who was to foot for the bill? Did some corrupt guy try to make a quick buck out of that Amisom money and had a friend of a friend supply some back door adulterated fuel(intentionally or not)?

KDF did a commendable job with their OLN media briefings, but they dropped the ball on this one. Even with little or no information, there should have been an official dispatch to the newsrooms. Speculation is inevitable in this age of internet news/media. With an information vacuum, rumors and speculations tend to be rife. On the Ugandan side, rumor has it that KDF shot down the choppers . Anyways nobody knows exactly what happened.

video from KTN Kenya on the initial rescue mission by a civilian aircraft operator


http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/index.php?videoID=2000059664&video_title=Ajali-Ya-Ndege-Mlima-Kenya
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/index.php?videoID=2000059669&video_title=uganda-military-chopper-crash

countersniper wrote:video from KTN Kenya on the initial rescue mission by a civilian aircraft operator


http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/index.php?videoID=2000059664&video_title=Ajali-Ya-Ndege-Mlima-Kenya
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/index.php?videoID=2000059669&video_title=uganda-military-chopper-crash

Chopper Crash: 2 bodies found, 5 soldiers rescued
At least two bodies have been recovered from the crash site where two Ugandan military helicopters crashed on the slopes of Mt Kenya. Five other soldiers were rescued alive and flown to Kenya’s military base in Laikipia for first aid and further treatment.
Brigadier Francis Ogolla gave an account of how six the helicopters were involved in the rescue operation.
Two of the Ugandan choppers were partly burned, but the luggage appeared neatly arranged a sign that there was life after the accident....
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/index.php?articleID=2000064036&story_title=Crash:-2-bodies-found,-5-soldiers-rescued

http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/2012/08/ug-choppers-update-8-rescued-2-dead/

do we rally know how many pax were in these choppers? there is no crew manifest? how many crew were seen at nanyuki air base where they actually took their lunch and fuel ?

They is some thing stinking bad in the Kenyan administration
and the respond time. The aircraft left Nanyuki
at 4:30 and the estimated crash time is said to be 5:00 i.e 30min. KDF launches
its rescue mission the next day. ????? That means the whole night they were not
tracking the helicopters in their own air space. I find it fishy to believe
that no rescue was mounted even after distress calls sent.

Flying Crane wrote:They is some thing stinking bad in the Kenyan administration
and the respond time. The aircraft left Nanyuki
at 4:30 and the estimated crash time is said to be 5:00 i.e 30min. KDF launches
its rescue mission the next day. ????? That means the whole night they were not
tracking the helicopters in their own air space. I find it fishy to believe
that no rescue was mounted even after distress calls sent.

The base commander of nanyuki airbase which is the main airbase for Kenyan air force facilities and assets has some explaining to do.
..but by the same token was the Ugandan side also tracking their own planes? when did they know and what action did they take?
i understand that already on the ground for purposes of AMISOM there was a ugandan military liaison officer based and attached to nanyuki kdf military base.
what does he know?
maybe talk to him before accusing the Kenyans .
my guess is...there is high probability the officer was busy playing pool in the officers mess.

@ Crane they is no point of pointing fingers at this moment. Experts are coming in to do a “root cause analysis” lets wait. If talking about it will makes you feel better, here is my take;
With all said and done my ball of contention lay is the overall situation awareness { http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness } of the flight leader and the overall training regarding the subject. Even if the flight leader crashed you must have always planned who takes command next until the last bird final grounds if anything. That’s why they are named and numbered bird Number 1,2,3 and so forth .

ON will agree with me the KDF has a field policy of “leave no man(injured or not) behind”. The media too blames the KDF for lack of quick response to the crash site. But if you are drilled in situation awareness and had discussed the flight path emergency and backup procedures then they is a lot to be question on the flight formation.
the 4th chopper (Mi-17)which made it safely was a utility craft capable of conducting rescues and evacuation and shouldn’t have further on out of the Mt.Kenya area , refuel and eventually out of the country to Mogadishu while its sister ships had sent out distressed signal. I would expect it to be the first to pick the survivors and flow them back to the LAB. During an accident the time between the accident and when medical assistance /rescue is the most important and that why more people are trained in first aid today more then ever.

if the visibility was poor I would still have expected the Mil-17 to turn to LAB and at first light mount a search base on where it had last left the sister ships with or without the KDF on their side. Abandoning the crash site yet you had distress calls which involved survives , wounded and some feared dead is akin to going to a disco party while your brother is at his death bed with no medicine.

please I don’t want to dwell match on the issue as I said earlier so lets wait for the Eastern experts/manufactures to come and investigate the incident..

I absolutely concur with the Bullet man, Crane, and from one brother to another, you know damn well it matters little what Uniform the men lost wore. We all grieve with you, and just like you we need answers to the cause of this loss. From the inside-out, I KNOW it is not possible in a hundred years to blame the KDF neither in ''commission'' nor in ''omission'' neither in institutional negligence - wilful or otherwise. Very specific Orders went out kitambo from the KDF-CDFto treat these transiting Gunships with extreme caution considering the times we are all living.

To add to the Bullet-man's posit, two other things scream for attention. 1. UPDF chose to transit Kenya utilizing local Civilian Assets and Liaison - the birds landed in Sirisia as soon as they broke into Kenya Airspace; note also the primary MediEvac by that Civilian hot-rod Pilot staged from & to a private Airstrip in Nanyuki, and not LAB. Refueling for onward leg to Garissa was from the same Civilian Airstrip. 2. KDF furnished UPDF/AF with all the usual Transiting Protocols including Charts, Weather, Call-signs and Radar IFF Signatures. The Birds were tracked before their cross-over till they simultaneously vanished from Radar. Specific Locations of each disappearance were established within minutes of their disappearance. Note also that this was not a KDF-assisted Transiting for reasons not too difficult to fathom. For the same reasons it took that long to find these poor Soldiers during daylight, the reasons were multiplied for mounting useful night-time rescue efforts - planes went down just before 18H00! At First-light that PUMA with a Troupe of rappelling Deltas was hovering over the first coordinates where the first Bird had gone off-radar! KDF could not have done any better were the Birds and Men our very own!!

I am angry that this critical transiting procedure(considering the times we are living in) was so treated with such naked pedestrian attention. In the SF where most activities are undertaken without verbal comms, the cardinal rule is to have eyes-on the next man. It works for the Fly-boys too - visual contact in a ''cold'' Flight. The Flight appears not to have any Emergency Protocols f any sort neither in the Birds nor the Crew - not even emergency transponders, nor rudimentary flares,for heavens sake! Crew had Mobile phones without Air-time, dammit!! Satellite-enabled Comms are mandatory for every Deploying KDF Units, Air and Ground. Those Soldiers were enplaned onto fighting ships like sheep onto a cargo boogey. Who and why altered the Flight Trajectory on-wards to Garissa South of the Big Mountain and not North of it as is prudently advised of Aircrew unfamiliar with the unique wind reactions to this massive Mountain.

Now, see again the queries posed by the Bullet-man on the basic Situation-awareness and the reactions of what was in essence a Military Flight. Dammit!! Coordinated, Controlled, Commanded??? Time will tell, no doubts about that! But what a fucking waste of very good men and equipment!!

Weighty points raised by @ON & @Risasi ... and too much at at stake for any party to shoot from the hip, granted the current situation has us out of range of our usual equilibrium but before we start getting trauma we need to remember we are soldiers *uniforms on forum* I've never been in uniform but my guess is that "you" are in a better position to digest the current state of affairs, there is a good amount of anger, confusion, guilt, shame and grief involved coz underneath we are all human, but @crane lets try to reconstruct the equilibrium that way we can analyze the situation with clear heads ... it would be pity to be at loggerheads over the issue...

@ole
are you saying these birds never landed on any of the KDF military facilities? all this time i was under the impression that the last fuel stop was done at LAB ?if that is not so then we have been wasting time writing stuff that is stranger than fiction.
i think these Ugandan choppers were more or less flying coffins.
no basic security survival kit no transponders and probably no GPS systems my guess is the pilots were flying my line of site and manual map reading using a compass.

ole Nkarei wrote:
UPDF chose to transit Kenya utilizing local Civilian Assets and Liaison - the birds landed in Sirisia as soon as they broke into Kenya Airspace; note also the primary MediEvac by that Civilian hot-rod Pilot staged from & to a private Airstrip in Nanyuki, and not LAB. Refueling for onward leg to Garissa was from the same Civilian Airstrip.

If the Ugandans could not trust the Kenyans as to use their military facilities when on transit, how did they expect to unify in the battle for Kismayu. There just seems to have been a string of errors and omissions which led to shortcuts be followed and what is glaringly coming forth is the gross incompetence of the pilots and the unairworthiness of the behemoths. Thank God they did not pass through urbanised areas. Lets hope that our legislature will put in place a law requiring any foreign aircraft whether civilian or military to submit an Airworthiness certificate from an approved regulator before entering the Kenyan Airspace. Otherwise they dismantle them in pieces and cart them through in boxes!!

It seems these Ugandan crews thought they are being very smart.
they got permission to fly through Kenya and without asking for escort of safe passage decided to use their alleged knowledge of Kenya..with disastrous consequences
it seems KDF was happy to avoid them using their facilities..and therefore not compromising their secrets.

i am stunned that they landed in a field in sirisia? is that true ?and not ELDORET airport itself?
how come no civilians reported seeing any strange aircraft's ?no pictures?so even the one that landed in garrisa was at an open airfield and not KDF facility ?
i can now see why the theory of radio silence comes in
these guys wanted to sneak past Kenya airspace and get to somalia ..but the gamble did not payoff.

Don't want to speculate on the justification for the Flight Trajectory. The entire Provincial Security Team with the Spooks had a chat with the Sirisia Farmer on Monday - the man denied there was a touch-down on his farm but said that the Flight was low over his farm. Not what neighbors, radar and satellite triangulation indicate. Eeeiish!

Anyone able to give the co-ordinates of the crash site? ... ... Or say the exact time of each crash? I am sure answering one of these should help approximate the other.

Flying Crane wrote:They is some thing stinking bad in the Kenyan administration
and the respond time. The aircraft left Nanyuki
at 4:30 and the estimated crash time is said to be 5:00 i.e 30min. KDF launches
its rescue mission the next day. ????? That means the whole night they were not
tracking the helicopters in their own air space. I find it fishy to believe
that no rescue was mounted even after distress calls sent.

My sincere condolences to our Ugandan brothers. @crane it will take us the next future to understand how an officer of the rank of a commissioned officer would fly a formation with missing men, refuel and proceed to another territory. This in itself begs questions than stink. Well this is time for sober debate and not pointing fingures

How does a pilot operating in friendly territory proceed in haste with a trip without sister ships with which they were in formation???? Further, how does the same pilot PROCEED on to Somalia before finding out about the safety of his comrades who were flying together in formation? What level of cohesion was existing between the officers piloting the planes? The pilot of the safe ship could have made so much more difference if he activated the distress procedures immediately; unless he was flying "alone". I can't wrap my head around what really informed this conduct!

It would have made so much more sense to approach Eastern Kenya by going round the mountain over the Timau areas but it would appear a group commander may have decided to go over the mountain, and the last pilot decided NOT to follow thus the lack of awareness??

These questions are real and very troubling indeed. Maybe we should just hold on a bit to get some more clarification. If @ON's posit is legit, then UPDF may have some explaining to do.

Mooz.

0:35 the residents back-up the first point Ole Nakeri stated