Navy Jet Crashes into Building in Virginia Beach

A witness told MSNBC cable television that he arrived seconds after the crash at a building he described as a two-story apartment building that he said had been hit dead center. Aerial television coverage showed black smoke billowing from several buildings.
The Sentara Virginia Beach Hospital admitted one patient who had been on the ground at the time of the crash, the public information officer at the facility said. The individual had suffered smoke inhalation, but their condition was unknown, the spokesman said.
A Navy official told NBC News that both pilots had been taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. "They were ambulatory," the official told NBC.
Chief Tim Riley of Virginia Beach Fire and Rescue said four to five buildings were on fire and that there was significant damage to about 20 apartments.
Cmdr. Phil Rosi of the Navy said the two-seat jet fighter crashed about 12:05 p.m. shortly after takeoff. He said both crew members ejected from the aircraft.
Witnesses described a frightening scene as they saw the aircraft plummet toward the ground.
John Swain told MSNBC he was driving, coming off Interstate 264 to head north.
"The plane came right over us and was clearly in difficulty," he said. “There was flames coming off the back … The plane got lower and lower and just as I turned … it crashed."

He said the jet apparently crashed into what looked like a two-story apartment building.
"Within five seconds of it going down I was at the building where it hit," Swain said.
Ernie Gonzalez, who is retired military, was sitting on the front porch of his daughter-in-law’s house behind the base where the jet had taken off. He said a few other jets had departed before the one that crashed for what was believed to be a practice or training run. The doomed jet quickly ran into trouble.
"He was flying real low like he didn’t have any power,” Gonzalez told msnbc.com by telephone.
"He was smoking really bad. Bad smoke was coming out of the engine. It kind of backfired a couple times. I heard two pops … then 15 seconds later I heard the explosion."
Gonzalez said the other jets then started circling around the crash site.
Austin Makie, of Virginia Beach, said he was golfing with two friends on a course a few miles away from where the jet went down. He said they were riding in a cart headed to the next hole when they heard a loud boom.
"We looked around … and there was a very large pile of smoke. There was really big stench like gas in the air," he told msnbc.com.
The jet was taking off from nearby Naval Air Station Oceana, a Navy official said.
State and local police were on the scene to assist the military, according to Grazia Moyers, spokeswoman for the Virginia Beach Police Department, NBC affiliate station WAVY reported.
"We are taking all possible steps at the state level to provide immediate resources and assistance to those impacted by the crash..." said Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. "Our fervent prayer is that no one was injured or killed in this accident."

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Russian space craft crash

MOSCOW — A Russian space probe designed to boost the nation’s pride on a bold mission to a moon of Mars has come down in flames, showering fragments into the south Pacific west of Chile’s coast, officials said.

Pieces from the Phobos-Ground, which had become stuck in Earth’s orbit, landed in water Sunday 1,250 kilometers (775 miles) west of Wellington Island in Chile’s south, the Russian military Air and Space Defense Forces said in a statement carried by the country’s news agencies.

The military space tracking facilities were monitoring the probe’s crash, its spokesman Col. Alexei Zolotukhin said. Zolotukhin said the deserted ocean area is where Russia guides its discarded space cargo ships serving the International Space Station.

RIA Novosti news agency, however, cited Russian ballistic experts who said the fragments fell over a broader patch of Earth’s surface, spreading from the Atlantic and including the territory of Brazil. It said the midpoint of the crash zone was located in the Brazilian state of Goias.

The $170 million craft was one of the heaviest and most toxic pieces of space junk ever to crash to Earth, but space officials and experts said the risks posed by its crash were minimal because the toxic rocket fuel on board and most of the craft’s structure would burn up in the atmosphere high above the ground anyway.

The Phobos-Ground was designed to travel to one of Mars’ twin moons, Phobos, land on it, collect soil samples and fly them back to Earth in 2014 in one of the most daunting interplanetary missions ever. It got stranded in Earth’s orbit after its Nov. 9 launch, and efforts by Russian and European Space Agency experts to bring it back to life failed.

Prof. Heiner Klinkrad, Head of The European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office that was monitoring the probe’s descent, said the craft didn’t pose any significant risks.

“This one is way, way down in the ranking,” he said in a telephone interview from his office in Berlin, adding that booster rockets contain more solid segments that may survive fiery re-entries.

Thousands of pieces of derelict space vehicles orbit Earth, occasionally posing danger to astronauts and satellites in orbit, but as far as is known, no one has ever been hurt by falling space debris.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos predicted that only between 20 and 30 fragments of the Phobos probe with a total weight of up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds) would survive the re-entry and plummet to Earth.

Klinkrad agreed with that assessment, adding that about 100 metric tons of space junk fall on Earth every year. “This is 200 kilograms out of these 100 tons,” he said.

The Phobos-Ground weighed 13.5 metric tons (14.9 tons), and that included a load of 11 metric tons (12 tons) of highly toxic rocket fuel intended for the long journey to the Martian moon of Phobos and left unused as the probe got stranded in orbit around Earth.

Roscosmos said that all of the fuel will burn up on re-entry, a forecast Klinkrad said was supported by calculations done by NASA and the ESA. He said the craft’s tanks are made of aluminum alloy that has a very low melting temperature, and they will burst at an altitude of more than 100 kilometers (60 miles).

Thousands of Birds Crash LAnd into WAL-MART Parking Lot

A Walmart parking lot in Cedar City, Utah was the site of mass carnage when thousands of birds crashed into the pavement Monday night, reports Brian Ahern at The Spectrum. 

Wildlife officials believe that the flock of migrating Grebes, a duck-like aquatic bird, was confused by storm clouds that made the parking lot look like a flat body of water.  

Though at least 1,500 birds perished in the crash-landing, rescue crews managed to save more than 2,000 birds as of late Tuesday and have been releasing them in a nearby pond, according to the AP. 

Read more: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-14/news/30515089_1_birds-parking-lot-wildlife-resource#ixzz1iv11rTua


http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-14/news/30515089_1_birds-parking-lot-wildlife-resource