Military investigators have concluded the crash of a Marine transport plane last year in Mississippi was caused by mistakes made six years earlier. The military has just finished briefing the families of the 16 men who died.
"It kills me inside because my children could still have their dad. I could still have my husband," said Ashley Kundrat.
CBS News spoke to her just after briefers from the Marine Corps told her what caused last year's crash of a KC-130, which killed her husband, Staff Sgt. William Kundrat, and 15 others. The transport plane, a workhorse of the American military, had simply disappeared from radar during a routine cross country flight.
The plane was flying at 20,000 feet when, without warning, a blade on the left inboard propeller flew off and sliced through the fuselage — a 130-pound object traveling at almost the speed of sound. The collision caused so much structural stress that the right inboard propeller came off and spun into the fuselage. The cockpit was severed from the plane and plummeted to Earth, followed moments later by the fuselage.
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kc-130-crash-in-mississippi-in-2017-could-have-been-prevented-military-investigation-finds/Short version, undetected corrosion in a propeller blade causing it to fail.
