An IAF pilot and navigator are feared dead after their F-16I fighter jet crashed in Mitzpeh Ramon.
AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov
Rescue services are searching for an Israel Air Force pilot and a navigator after their F-16I fighter crashed on Wednesday evening in a Negev canyon.
Their F-16I Sufa (storm) took off from the Ramon Air Force base and crashed somewhere in the area of Mitzpeh Ramon at around 8 P.M. Wednesday. It was still not clear whether the two had managed to eject themselves.
On Thursday morning, the Israel Defense Forces released the names of the missing servicemen: pilot Maj. Amichai Itkis, 28, from Sde Warburg; and navigator Maj. Emanuel Levy, 30, from Ma’aleh Adumim. Their families have been notified.
The fighter jet that crashed was leading a four aircraft training exercise when it suddenly fell to the ground, failing to report any problems before the disaster occurred.
The IAF has opened an investigation into the incident and has canceled all training exercises using the F-16I jets for the time being.
The F-16 is the main fighter jet used by the IAF. The Israel Defense Forces acquired 102 of the two-seater F-16Is – a more advanced model – from Lockheed Martin between 2004 and 2008. Only a handful of safety incidents involving those jets have occurred over the course of those years.
In 2009, an F-16I was forced to make an emergency landing shortly after take off from the Ramon base due to a technical glitch. During the Second Lebanon War, two crew members on an F-16I were forced to eject on the tarmac during take-off.
The last fatal crash involving an IAF jet on Israeli soil was in September 2009, when Captain Asaf Ramon – son of late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon – was killed while flying an F16-A in south Mount Hebron.
The year before that, two pilots were killed during routine training on a Cobra attack helicopter in the Jezre’el Valley.
In July of this year, an IAF CH-53 helicopter crashed during an exercise in Romania, killing six Israeli servicemen and a Romanian liaison officer.
Cue Twilight Zone music:
Ilam Ramon died in the space shuttle crash
Asaf Ramon died in an F16-A crash
This latest crash occurred in Mitzpeh Ramon
An IAF helicopter crashed in Romania earlier this year
“We will continue to do everything in order to get to the bottom of Arafat’s assassination and poisoning,”
It’s not too hard to work out one or more bottoms were involved in his death.
6:25PM: The bodies of IAF pilot Maj. Amichai Itkis and navigator Maj. Emanuel Levy have been found at the crash site of the F-16I fighter jet in Mitzpeh Ramon.
1:25PM: Today is a great day in the history of the world. The day an arch terrorist croaked 6 years ago.
Yasser Arafat.
Every year, I mark this day by publishing some of my favorite blog posts on him.
10:12AM: Israel rates a mention in Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ latest column.
The United States is a nation founded by people who couldn’t stand the leaders of their old homelands. I’m no geneticist, but I suspect that the “screw it, I’m out of here” attitude can get passed on. We’re probably the most disgruntled, self-loathing, hard-to-satisfy people on Earth. It’s no wonder our GDP is awesome.
Israel is another perfect example. The entire nation is full of people who were displeased with their last situation. And Israel’s economy is one of the most vibrant in the world. If every Israeli became satisfied at once, they couldn’t keep the lights on for a week.
10:02AM: According to Time Magazine, Egypt tipped off Israel about an Army of Islam terrorist, allowing us to vaporize his sorry ass.
But being Time Magazine, they report it in their biased way.
The Nov. 3 assassination of Mohammad Namnam looked pretty much exactly like the fiery deaths of a lot of other Islamic militants in the Gaza Strip over the years. He was making his way in broad daylight through the tattered streets of Gaza City when his sedan turned into a fireball. The missile arrived from an Israeli helicopter hovering so far away that onlookers at first thought the explosion was a car bomb.
The death was not routine, however. Israel has refrained for months from assassination by missile, just as Hamas, the fundamentalist militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, has held back from launching homemade rockets into Israel. And the dead man was a senior operative not of Hamas but of another, more extreme militia called the Army of Islam. Namnam, a senior commander of the group some analysts describe as linked to al-Qaeda, was tracked and killed after Israeli security operatives learned that he was preparing a terror attack on U.S. forces stationed in the Sinai Desert not far from coastal Palestinian enclave ruled by Hamas.
But the most striking element of the operation was the source of the tip: Egyptian intelligence gleaned news of the plot from Army of Islam operatives captured earlier in the Sinai. Egyptian security forces work to interdict arms and explosives on smuggling routes that run across the vast expanse from Sudan to Gaza. But sharing the intelligence on Namnam with their Israeli counterparts marked a level of Egyptian cooperation not seen by the Jewish state in years. “Egypt is helping much more,” a security source in the region tells TIME.
This being the Middle East, the explanation involves a blend of shared interests and revenge. Sources familiar with the operation credited the change in Egypt’s posture to President Hosni Mubarak’s anger at another enemy of Israel, Hizballah, the Shi’a militia based in Lebanon. Last year Egyptian state media announced that 49 Hizballah agents were arrested in Sinai for plotting against Egypt. “They bought apartments near the Suez, speedboats, cars,” says the security source. “They built a very big infrastructure around not only Gaza smuggling but also targeting Sinai tourism.” Mubarak, incensed, issued a public warning to Hizballah, Hamas and their main state sponsors, Syria and Iran. “We will uncover their plot,” the president proclaimed. “Beware of Egypt’s wrath.”
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
