I don't know, but I'd expect EGPWS would be useless in such a situation. The very nature of aerial firefighting is that you're maneuvering in close proximity to the terrain, away from charted airports. Unless you had inhibited it, it would be giving terrain alerts continuously.

I am with A Squared on that - I believe it would have been off.

These aircraft fly IFR enroute, and once arriving at the fire ground operate exclusively VFR until picking up an IFR clearance again on returning to the aerodrome.

I fear that in the pursuit for a successful retardant drop, the crew might have inadvertently blurred the lines of what 'visual' meant. Perhaps this is an absolutely extreme case of 'get-there-itis' but in a far different circumstance where the result of aborting the operation is far different.

It won't be classed as a CFIT because the ICAO ADREP definition specifically excludes intentional low-altitude operations: Aviation Occurrence Categories

It won't be found to be CFIT anyway because some complete f*tard with an SCPL and a keyboard already identified the cause as the wings separating inflight and others agreed.
Now we have people "fearing" publicly about the competence of the crew. You guys are awesome.

Just an observation: it’s a little strange that some of the same people who completely lost the plot at (and continue to ridicule) one or two previous posters speculating on the cause of this awful accident seem to be perfectly fine with the more recent speculation.

So, are we waiting for the official report or does it depend on who it is doing the speculating as to whether it’s ok or not?

?

Do you have other images that support your observation? The images on this forum show a shallow impact angle at a moderate speed in a near wings level attitude. It is inferable that the body attitude was nose up relative to the terrain at impact, but that is also open to interpretation, the debris field will determine that. As the terrain along the slope has an upslope angle, the "nasty rate of descent" does not correlate with the images at low resolution. As far as speed goes, the tail staying on the aircraft, and being within the wreckage trail doesn't support a very high speed impact event. From prior C130 losses, this would not be much greater than the flap limit speed.

Not sure I agree with your assessment.

What is indicated is that the aircraft was likely in one piece and under control up to impact. There is a very low likelihood of an inflight breakup event here, or loss of a primary flight control. Whether the engines were producing thrust would be determined by the wreckage scars and the direction of bending of the propeller blades, and detail within the compressor and turbine.

Low flying over undulating terrain in poor visibility carries a high operational risk, and the guys that do that should be respected for their turning up day after day in challenging conditions to go and do the task.

Mainly because the previous speculation and discussion contained such brilliantly eloquent statements of fact such as:

”It was an accident waiting to happen”
“When you take into account this aircrafts chequered history.”

Pretty different story to, hey, here’s my opinion on these images of the accident site.

So yeah, really not that strange.

I think the distinction that's being made is the difference between, on one hand, simple speculation along the lines of "do you think xxx might have been a factor in the accident?"

and, on the other hand, bald assertions that the accident was caused by (for example) an inflight breakup, based on dodgy data analysis that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Thank you Dave, that answered my curiosity, another subtlety to the myriad of configurations and special fits to the C-130 family.

Probably because once the picture came out of the skid mark up to the top of the hill, it because much more obvious as to what took place for those able to interpret the most likely scenario.

Yes, this. I have no issue with intelligent people, speculating intelligently about possible scenarios based on known facts and personal experience. OZbusdrivers's post is a good example of such. I have little patience for the sanctimonious twits who inevitably pop up on a discussion of an accident and insist loudly and obnoxiously that nobody may discuss possible causes, that we must only read the official report when it is issued.

That said, what SCPL_1988 was posting was not intelligent, reasoned, fact based speculation. Quite the contrary, it was accusatory ranting that disregarded the very facts he claims as support. For whatever reason, he jumped to the conclusion, without any supporting evidence at all , that this accident was due to structural failure involving wing separation, then he went on for pages, insisting that the flight tracking data demonstrated wing separation, even claiming that you could tell from the data when the wing separated. In fact the tracking data shows pretty clearly that the wing did not separate, as he claimed. In my previous post responding to him, you can see the kind of ridiculous claims he was making. (clicking the little arrow icon after my name in the quote box will take you to that post)

That post of mine quotes his more ridiculous assertions and will link you back to the actual posts of his in which he made them, if you're interested in understanding why he's receiving criticism. The bottom line is that the flight tracking data in no way supports an inflight breakup. There in no flight parameter in the available data set, neither groundspeed, nor rate of descent, nor any other parameter which wouldn't be recorded from that same airplane flying an instrument approach. The recorded groundspeeds are all well within the flight envelope of a C-130 with flaps extended, and at no point within the last 20 minutes of flight did the rate of descent exceed 1000 ft per minute. One would have to be a complete idiot to keep insisting that this is characteristic of an inflight breakup. Unfortunately, SCPL_1988 is that person. There is no inconsistency between believing that there is nothing wrong with intelligent, reasonable speculation on the possible causes of an accident, and being strongly critical of the kind of stupidity which SCPL_1988 was posting.

Hi Cedric,

First, the post of mine to which you refer (Jan 24, permalink #139) was not directed at you. I was speaking of the posts by the now infamous SCPL_1988 but I intentionally left out his identity so as not to provoke a mod into deleting my message as a personal attack. Now that many others have taken him to task for his antagonistic, insulting and ill-informed posts, which were excellent examples of how to lower a professional discussion into a "fake news" style bar-fight, I suppose it's been agreed that his rants were atrocious enough that mentioning his name is acceptable, as an example of how not to behave on a professional site such as pprune.

In any event, in the past two days, other people, more patient than myself (such as A Squared, DavidReidUK, Squawk7700, and junior.VH-LFA) have succinctly and professionally explained why the likes of SCPL_1988 need to be called out if we hope to keep pprune as good as it can be. And it can be superb.

Sidebar to A Squared: Based on your location (per your profile) and your Herc experience, I'm thinking there's a good chance we've chatted over a beer at Happy Hour at Airways in the past couple of years.

Stay safe, mates

There is video running around of the last minute of flight which indicates the aircraft was operating normally. I am sure it will assist the ATSB in their investigation.

Video here:

Thanks for posting. That video adds a whole new dimension as to what went wrong and one would argue muddies the waters significantly.

How so? Low level flight, rising terrain, potentially very poor visibility...

Looks a little like they possibly flew into decreasing visibility and unfortunately found the rising terrain maybe too late to climb away from....
Whatever went wrong still a sad day for aviation in Australia

Exactly... it’s the same conditions they have been flying in for the previous 130 missions!

The point of impact appears to be significantly lower than their last observed altitude. If the fireball shown in the video is at the start of the 200 metre uphill “scrape” then it is even more puzzling.

It is very disappointing this video has become public domain.

Yes this is the sort of thing that ought have been given to the ATSB.
The heart sinks imagining their loved ones, on a long dark night of sadness stumbling across their last seconds.