Tuesday marks the 20th anniversary of a crash of a surveillance and communications aircraft? in Anchorage that killed all 24 people aboard. The plane, known as Yukla 27, hit a flock of about 30 geese on takeoff at Elmendorf Air Force Base and plummeted into the trees near the end of the runway in 1995.
The plane, a Boeing E-3 Sentry jet, was an AWACS or Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft. American and Canadian crews still fly missions from the same runway, in essentially the same type of plane.
Hear the members of the 962nd Airborne Air Control Squadron talk about an upcoming memorial for Yukla 27, and how the crash -- the only deadly AWACS crash in Air Force history -- has affected the unit and the way the Air Force trains its pilots.
Today, each student AWACS pilot must run the Yukla 27 flight in a simulator to learn that there are some situations from which a pilot can't recover.
"Normally, in the simulator, the instructors are upbeat and the pilots are upbeat," said 962nd AAAC Commander Lt. Col. Eric Gonzalez. "But when it comes to that one scenario, you can notice the tension... When the plane comes to a stop and the screen goes red because you crashed the simulator, it gets pretty quiet in that [simulator], and it makes it real, even though it's completely fake. But, it makes it real."
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