Sunday, September 08, 2013

Crashed MV-22 pic goes viral. (Image and text via Military Blogging.com)

Image via Reddit / Keggerss

The photo of a crashed Marine Osprey with a Marine sitting nearby drinking a Rip-it and smoking a cigarette has received over one million views online in less than 24 hours.

A caption alongside the viral pic reads, "One horrible day for me in Afghanistan."

Reddit user named "Keggerss" posted the photo.

The story of what happened was told in the comments by Keggerss. 

“Just so everyone knows I was a passenger not the pilot.
Story Time. Now everyone forgive me im typing this out on my mobile. This was roughly halfway through my deployment. My unit had been doing helo raids and helo inserts for months before this happened. So everyone was somewhat used to getting rained on by hydraulic fluid which shoots from everywhere when these things fly. Somehow you convince yourself that cant be a bad thing. So we departed our FOB late night the plane was operating as nomal we had a 45 minute flight. The crew Chief looked back and gave us the 5 minutes till landing. The osprey is going in for its lading everything is still ok. Now when these land there props rotate and make a loud pop, This time though it was deafining you knew something was wrong it felt like the osprey was having a seizure. Its pitch black you cant tell how far you are from the ground then it hits. My body was instantly in pain. As you can see in the picture we landed on a ledge and it pinned the rear hatch of the bird closed. We had to exit out of the right door gunners exit. Everybody on the plane was instantly ordered to get into a defensive position. Mortars started coming in about 10 minutes afterwards. This is just a gold mine for the Taliban and a nightmare for us Marines. There were still other Ospreys around when this happened so what did the pilots of this bird do? They jumped on another Osprey and rode back to the FOB. Meanwhile we had to protect there plane. I always figured this was one of those things like a captain goes down with his ship. A convoy from a FOB came out and dismantled this plane and loaded it up on trucks and hauled it back roughly a week later. Sorry for how horribly typed this is! Anymore questions just let me know. P. S. RIP IT SHOULD OBVIOUSLY ENDORSE ME
EDIT : For everyone in the comments who is military bashing. Wait for it. I don't care! I am just doing my job. For everyone throwing support my way I greatly appreciate it!”

Comments left by users have reached nearly 2,000.

You can read the discussion thread and see the original photo here on Reddit.


11 comments :

  1. Mishaps happen. Not much to do about it. Good to see the guys got out OK. Not a big Osprey fan but this would be considered normal attrition. Just what is being lost is giga-dollars.

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  3. Wow. Nobody even got hurt. What an indictment of the aircraft. Not like any other aircraft ever fails, if we had a nickel for every UH60 or CH47 crash we'd have a buttload of nickels.

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    1. double edged sword with tilt rotors. with the engines being out on the wings you don't have additional mass accelerating down into the cargo cabin in the event of a crash on land. on water my bet is that its going to rotate just like every other helicopter. and you're gonna be in the dark, upside down clawing for an exit while ditching gear. pray you weren't doing a nighttime insertion in that case.

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  4. Great photo. Bound to become a classic. "Join the Marines. Another day in the life of the infantry." ;-) Anyone in any infantry long enough will see or experience something like this. Classic. It's good as long as no one got hurt.

    BTW, I'm guessing this might be better in a water hard landing than regular RW. With the wings there might be more resistance to tipping completely upside-down. I hope no-one gets the chance to test it.

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  5. LOL. The most interesting thing to me is how the hydraulics leave the same impression to the guys in back as the H-53's did. My unit had some of the baddest hot rod H-53s on the planet(Navy A models with E model drivetrains), but going cross-country there were only two 'tools' they always stocked up on: Cases of hydraulic fluid and lots of rags. If you lined up all our FE's in a row you could easily pick out the H-53 guys from the C-130 guys by the discolored flight jackets.
    The second most interesting thing is how intact the V-22 still is. H-53s will break in half with about the same impact. This may be the advantages of gliding vs. autorotating. I'd love to see the accident report.

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    1. yeah but the crazy thing is that they all leak in the fleet but the birds that fly with HMX-1 are all leak free. they fly OCS candidates and Basic School LTs out to training areas in them (more like a "hey, this is how we do things kinda ride) and its all spot free. never understood how they could keep stuff pristine and they're all trashed in the fleet.

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    2. Navy "A" models with "E" drivetrains? Don't think so!!!

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  6. Take a break whenever you can, and smoke 'em if you got 'em. Some things never change.

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  7. I x-rayed quite a few Marines, living and killed, who went down in helos during my AD days in the '90's at NAVMEDCTR in San Diego. Back then it was always accidents; some at sea and some on land and the deaths of the pilots crew and Marines were heartbreaking.

    The fact that Keggerss here is seen having a laugh and a smoke instead of writing in pain with bilateral leg fractures and compression-fractured vertebrae...or a charred corpse hanging halfway out the gunner's door... makes me feel very good inside. Very good indeed...God bless our USMC.

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