A UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter assigned to the Louisiana National Guard at Hammond, Louisiana crashed during a training mission at an Eglin AFB range about 10 miles from my house last night. In addition to the 4 National Guard crewmembers, there were 7 Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

At the time we had dense fog, the visibility wasn’t better than a block at most, and it would have been worse over Choctawhatchee Bay. They took off from the Destin airport and headed North to the Eglin Range on the other side of an arm of the Bay.

They were probably using nightvision goggles which eliminate depth perception, and the fog would have distorted things. Debris and remains have been found on a beach.

The BBC reported on the crash, but they made it sound like it occurred near Pensacola, rather than almost 50 miles away.

It is unlikely any one survived, but they are still calling it a search and rescue mission. It couldn’t really get started until this morning when the fog began to lift.

Brent Sass got smacked between the eyes with an Apple! Actually he had an Apple IPod Touch which has WiFi capabilities, that makes it a ‘two-way communications device’ and a violation of the rules of the Iditarod, so he has been disqualified.

Martin, Hugh, DeeDee, and Kelly Maixner took their 8-hour mandatory stop at Tanana, so Aliy’s lead is not as big as it appears.

At Ruby
1 Mitch Seavey (18)
2 Dallas Seavey (46)
3 Aaron Burmeister (63)
4 Martin Buser (4)
5 Aliy Zirkle (32)
Beyond Tanana
6 Joar Leifseth Ulsom (16)
7 Hugh Neff (24)
8 Peter Kaiser (54)
9 Jessie Royer (3)
10 Ken Anderson (36)
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