Days Before Runaway Military Blimp, Another Blimp Accident in Kabul Killed Five

RSS Feed

Days Before Runaway Military Blimp, Another Blimp Accident in Kabul Killed Five

October 30th, 2015

Awake Goy

The runaway military surveillance blimp that came loose from an Army base in Maryland on Wednesday dragged its torn tether through power lines in two Pennsylvania counties before crashing into the woods.

But at least no one died.

The same can’t be said of a recent accident involving a U.S. military blimp in Kabul that constantly hovers over the Afghan capital. (See “The Above,” a short documentary from The Intercept‘s Field of Vision project, also embedded below.)

On Oct. 11, a British military helicopter was coming in for a landing at NATO headquarters, where the blimp is moored. According to an eyewitness who spoke to the BBC, the helicopter hit the tether, which then wrapped itself around the rotors. The helicopter crashed, killing five people – two U.S. servicemembers, two British servicemembers, and a French contract civilian — and injuring five more.

The helicopter was a Puma Mk2, carrying members of NATO involved in training and mentoring Afghanistan’s air force.

The two American casualties were both from the Air Force: Maj. Phyllis J. Pelky, 45, an aide-de-camp to the Air Force Academy superintendent; and Master Sgt. Gregory T. Kuhse, 38, who was assigned to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.

The British dead were identified as Flight Lieutenant Alan Scott and Flight Lieutenant Geraint “Roly” Roberts, both of the Royal Air Force.

The BBC’s Andy Moore reported that the British Defense Ministry was investigating. “Official military sources say only that somehow or other, during the course of that incident, the cable of the balloon was severed,” he said.

The blimp deflated and eventually crashed to the ground nearby.

Its deflation was captured on video. Afghan onlookers, used to seeing the blimp as impregnable and omniscient, cheered, and urged the person filming it to post the video on Facebook, which he did.

The blimps that fly over Kabul are part of what’s called the Persistent Threat Detection System. They provide live 24-hour video surveillance of the area, allowing operators to zoom in on specific locations to see what’s going on.

But officials value them for more than just surveillance. As a 2012 Army “After Action Report” from Afghanistan noted, the balloons “serve as a great deterrent even if they aren’t operational. INS [insurgents] and LNs [local nationals] alike believe the blimp can see everything and will act differently when it’s up. ”

The report’s recommendation: to fly the balloons “as much as possible, even if the camera systems/feed is broken. Work IO [Information Operation] messages that re-enforce the perception that [they] can see everything.”

The Oct. 11 accident was not the first time helicopters in Afghanistan have hit a blimp’s tether. Defense News reported in 2013 that at least three Army blimps in Afghanistan were lost due to a “helicopter tether strike” during the course of one year. That led the military to make the tethers more visible, placing “flags and visible light and infrared strobes at regular intervals on the tethers to help improve visibility.”

In Kabul, the sight of a runaway blimp is also apparently not nearly as rare as it is in Pennsylvania. Defense Newsdescribed an incident in 2011 where a blimp got loose, “speeding through the sky, out of control, carried by the furious wind. Suddenly, an F-16 fighter jet roared close and then opened fire, mangling the blimp-like dirigible, like blasting a football with a round of buckshot. Gradually, the aerostat slumped to the ground.”