US intelligence plane crashes in Afghanistan.

A Raytheon Sentinel, which is the British equivalent to the Boeing E-11a. British Government Photo.

A US E-11a intelligence plane has crashed in Afghanistan. BBC. The plan crashed in Taliban territory but the US military does not believe that the plane was brought down by enemy fire. The E-11a is a fairly rare airplane as this was one of only four used by the Air Force. It is a converted private jet used to monitor communications and boost connections between ground units, which is extremely useful in the mountainous terrain in Afghanistan. It is unclear how many people were on board the plane when it crashed but there are no reports of survivors. 

My Comment:

Just a quick post on this subject. This story is mostly notable for the fact that the E-11a's are extremely rare. We only have three more of these jets so losing 1/4 of our E-11a's is a pretty big deal. They are rare aircraft and losing any of them is not a good thing to say the least. 

It's very unclear why this plane crashed. The Pentagon claims that it wasn't brought down by enemy fire and I tend to believe that. I doubt that the Taliban has any weapons that could hit a jet flying so high in the sky. My guess is that the crash was due to mechanical failure or some kind of accident, which is common enough. 

It's possible that these planes were being used too much. We only had four of them and my guess is that they were all needed in Afghanistan. It's a very difficult country to operate in and without planes like this one flying it can be very hard to communicate. With that being the case it's possible we were overworking these planes and that could have lead to this accident. This problem will of course now get much worse with one of the planes being destroyed. 

It doesn't look like there were any survivors in this crash. It's unclear how many people were on board but it's going to be at least a couple, which is tragic of course. Any death is tragic but one at such a late stage in the Afghanistan War is doubly so. We might finally be pulling out of there soon so let's hope that these are some of the last casualties we have in Afghanistan.