crazydrumguy

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Oklahoma Guard Accidentally Bombs Tulsa

Okay, so it was just a dummy bomb with only a small smoke charge in the warhead. Still, a fighter pilot with the Oklahoma Air National Guard accidentally dropped a bomb on a Tulsa apartment:

About 3 p.m. Thursday, a National Guard jet pilot left the Tulsa Air National Guard Base for the Smokey Hill Gunnery Range in Salina, Kan., on what Guard officials said was a routine mission.

Shortly after takeoff, a BDU-33, one of six dummy training bombs, was inadvertently released from the Air Guard aircraft and crashed through the apartment complex.

The military pilot apparently never knew the bomb had been released, and continued to the Kansas test field to complete the mission. Col. Bruce Butter, vice commander of the Oklahoma Air National Guard’s 138th Fighter Wing based at Tulsa International Airport, said each of the two planes on the mission made six passes on the bomb range, dropping one of the bombs on each pass. It was on the last pass that there was an indication there could be a problem, since scorers on the ground reported a “no spot” because he did not see smoke that would indicate a hit.
…
About 7 p.m. Friday, however, Butter said the Air Guard received a call from the Tulsa police bomb squad saying they had seen the practice bomb in the apartment, and that it had been fairly easy to identify it, since the bomb squad had trained with the Air Guard.

I really can’t quite fathom how an F-16 can accidentally drop a bomb or how a trained pilot wouldn’t notice that one of his bombs seems to have fallen off of the fucking plane. Thankfully nobody was injured. AP video follows.