[News] Bad day in Virginia Beach

[Gared]

An F-18D Hornet has crashed into an apartment building in Virginia Beach, VA. The crew managed to eject and suffered only minor to moderate injuries, and at current count there were only four injuries (none of them life-threatening) on the ground.

Pics (most of them just of smoke in the distance, but a couple shots of the tail end of the downed fighter jet and of firefighters attempting to extinguish the resultant fire).

 

[Officer_Charon]

Living in Savannah, with Hunter Army Airfield separated from the Southside by a chicken-and-barbed-wire fence, this is something I dread happening here. There's ALWAYS Chinooks and Blackhawks flying overhead, with C-130s and C-17s being fairly regular customers. Occasionally, we get visits from FA-18s from Beaufort, SC, too.

I run through scenarios in my head whenever I see or hear one acting abnormal, just in case.

 

[Gared]

We get a pretty good amount of military flights coming overhead as well, but we're far enough out that we don't usually have to worry about catastrophic failure crashes like this one. All we have to deal with is the state police flying overhead with their IR sensors on trying to hunt down drug dealers in the wooded areas behind the apartment complex, at dusk.

Apparently there are concerns that this is the final straw for the base, and that it'll be BRAC'd in the next round of closures. They were almost BRAC'd in '05 over concerns that this very thing may happen.

 

[jwhouk]

I should know that Acronym... "Base Re utilization And Closure", or something like that?

 

[Gared]

I would assume so, all I could gather from context was that it had to do with base closures.

 

[fade]

realignment.

 

[jwhouk]

I closed the acronym finder after I posted it, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what the "B" and the "C" is for.