Five soldiers from Fort Wainwright were injured in Iraq early Saturday morning when their twin-engine Chinook cargo helicopter lost power and the pilot was forced to make an emergency landing, the Army announced Monday.
The names of the injured helicopter crew members, all from Company B, 4th Battalion, 123rd aviation regiment, were not available Monday, but none of the injuries was life-threatening, said Linda Douglass, a public affairs officer at Fort Wainwright, the army base outside Fairbanks.
Two of the Chinook's crew were taken to Germany for treatment. Two others were treated and released, and another was held overnight in a hospital, she said.
Few other details of the accident were released, including where in Iraq it occurred and what type of mission the CH-47 Chinook was on, Douglass said. The helicopter lost power to both engines and suffered substantial damage in its emergency landing, she said. Officials are investigating the accident.
The injured soldiers were part of a group of more than 500 helicopter pilots, crews and mechanics from Fort Wainwright assigned to Middle East duty last December and January. Some went to Afghanistan, others went to Kuwait and, more recently, some have been posted in Iraq, Douglass said, though she did not know where the injured crew was based.
When Alaska personnel shipped out, they took nearly a dozen Black Hawk helicopters, along with a dozen of the workhorse twin-rotor Chinooks, which also are used to rescue injured climbers on Mount McKinley and other high peaks in the Alaska Range.
The helicopter crash followed an incident Friday in which an Army sergeant from Fort Richardson suffered minor injuries from a bomb explosion in Afghanistan.
The sergeant, a vehicle gunner with Company C of the 864th Engineer Battalion whose name was not released by the army, was injured when an improvised explosive device went off during a mission in Wech Baktu, U.S. Army Alaska spokesman Chuck Canterbury said in a press release Monday.
More than 100 men and women from the Fort Richardson unit deployed to Afghanistan in April, with a mission of rebuilding the civilian and military infrastructure, Army officials said at the time.
Daily News reporter Joel Gay can be reached at jgay@adn.com or at 257-4310.
