LOS ANGELES (AP) — A B-52 bomber crashed shortly after takeoff at a U.S. Air Pressure base in Southern California’s Mojave Desert and burst into flames Monday, killing all eight folks aboard, navy officers mentioned.
Aerial footage confirmed just about nothing left of the plane that went down round 11:20 a.m. throughout a routine check mission at Edwards Air Pressure Base, which is north of Los Angeles. Black smoke rose from a big swath of charred desert close to the runway on the bottom, with emergency autos close by.
These on the B-52 included authorities contractors and uniformed navy. Plane producer Boeing confirmed Monday night that two of its staff have been on board.
After reviewing footage of the crash, it was decided that nobody may have survived, Col. James Hayes, the deputy commander for the 412 check wing at Edwards, mentioned at a information convention.
“We misplaced eight nice People,” Hayes mentioned, including that officers have been working to inform their households.
It was not instantly clear what precipitated the crash, and it may take as much as six months to finish an investigation, Hayes mentioned, however shared that the B-52 was supporting the “radar modernization program.”
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress is a long-range bomber that entered service in 1955. Designed to hold each typical and nuclear weapons, it has been utilized in conflicts involving the U.S. navy from Vietnam to Iran.
In 2025, Boeing despatched a B-52 to Edwards with a brand new, modernized radar system. A check group deliberate to conduct floor and flight check actions on the plane all through 2026 to feed a manufacturing resolution, the air power mentioned in a 2025 information launch. The fashionable Energetic Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar system changed the plane’s antiquated radar for efficacy. It was unclear if that was the identical plane concerned in Monday’s crash.
Edwards Air Pressure Base is house to a big portion of the U.S. Air Pressure’s plane check and growth efforts and is about 100 miles (161 km) north of Los Angeles. The 412th Check Wing, which runs the bottom, additionally conducts developmental testing of all Air Pressure plane, weapons programs, software program and elements earlier than buy by the service in addition to all through their lifespan.
The huge desert base is the place Air Pressure check pilot Chuck Yeager reached a pace of Mach 1.05 and broke the sound barrier in 1947.
The airfield was closed most of Monday and all inbound plane have been being diverted, nevertheless it reopened to folks coming onto the bottom by late afternoon. Non-commercial customer passes for the bottom have been suspended as emergency crews doused the flames.
It’s too quickly to say what may need occurred.
Air Pressure Secretary Troy Meink mentioned he’s deeply saddened by the lives misplaced.
“We mourn this loss and honor the service of our Airmen, civilians, and contractors who work day by day to advance our mission,” he mentioned in a publish on X.
The best way the B-52 crashed so shortly after takeoff with out getting very excessive or going far makes aviation security professional Jeff Guzzetti suspect some type of flight management malfunction.
It’s attainable the controls have been rigged improper after upkeep, he mentioned, or a catastrophic engine drawback or a failure of a bit of kit that was being examined.
“I feel it was positively a controllability challenge. Now, whether or not that was tied to an engine failure, a flight management failure, or some new testing machine failure, I’m unsure,” mentioned Guzzetti, who used to research crashes for each the Federal Aviation Administration and the Nationwide Transportation Security Board.
Though the Air Pressure has been flying B-52 bombers for greater than 70 years, testing out new tools on a airplane can create new challenges.
“A flight check is all the time riskier than regular operations, in order that’s why you will have specifically skilled check pilots, and it is best to produce other security protocols,” Guzzetti mentioned.
Lately, deadly Air Pressure coaching accidents within the U.S. have included an teacher pilot who was killed in 2024 when the ejection seat activated whereas the plane was nonetheless on the bottom in Texas and an Air Pressure ROTC cadet’s dying in a 2022 accident involving a Humvee throughout a coaching train in Idaho. Two Air Pressure pilots have been killed when a coach jet crashed close to an Alabama airport in 2021.
Toropin reported from Washington, D.C. AP Transportation Author Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, and AP reporters Hallie Golden in Seattle and Jennifer Kelleher in Honolulu contributed to this report.