More Images of the Balad AN-26 Crash

On Friday, I posted the first images of the 2007 crash of a civil turboprob airliner near Balad, Iraq. The original plan - crowdsourcing the analysis of the crash scene - isn’t feasible, as the wreckage was in too bad of shape; all the kings horses and all the kings men aren’t putting that plane back together again.

Still, we can have a closer look at some of the wreckage, and try to figure out which, if any, of the stories are true - was it really carrying construction workers, and their equipment? Or was it carrying supplies for the insurgents? Was it carrying something else entirely?

The images posted Friday were full, uncropped images taken by USAF personnel, and released under the Freedom of Information Act. A few had histogram adjustments made, for clarity, but otherwise they were unmodified, only resized to fit this website. These images below are cropped to varying degrees, to better examine pieces of the wreckage - and its cargo.

Keep in mind that large portions of the plane - and, one presumes, its contents - were consumed by fire after the crash. Where I use the term “cargo” or “contents” below, they should be read as prefixed by “surviving”.

Looking through the wreckage photos, the most prominent identifiable items throughout are the numerous packages of what seem to be medical products:

Ranitab is a Turkish medication containing Ranitidine, the active ingredient in, among other things, Zantac.

I can’t find a reference anywhere for “GE-Oral”, or what it does. The big red thing is, I believe, a valve fitting of some sort, probably off the plane.

Tetradox is an antibacterial and antiprotozoal drug used to treat acne, herpes simplex… and malaria.

After bits of paper - mainly magazines and books - the next-most common item in the wreckage were CDs or DVDs:

There was a fair amount of food in the wreckage:

That appears to be a large ham, resting under the remains of one of the Antonov’s wings.

Other than that, there were some clothes - including a lot of white rubber Croc-style sandals, perhaps means as “shower sandals”. Most of the wreckage, of course, was pieces of the airplane itself:

This was the only identifiable tool found in the released photos of the wreckage:

There were no signs of construction supplies, save - possible - one or two of these items, which I haven’t been able to rule out as structural components of the airplane itself:

That object might be debris that was already on the ground when the plane crashed; though it’s a farm field, there are a few items scattered around that look like they could be parts of a razed building - perhaps a farmhouse or outbuilding; this, for example, looks to me like a piece of broken concrete:

Notable absent from the wreckage - or at least those parts visible in the released photos - are, in addition to bodies, of course, anything of a particularly military nature. No weapons, or storage, packing, or dust cases; no ammunition or casings or boxes; nothing else. As shown Friday, there was one old, Soviet-era gas mask found in the wreckage:

Like I warned at the beginning of this project, these photos really raise more questions than they do answers. Nonetheless, now the world has a better - though far from perfect - look at what happened in that Iraqi field one cold January day back in 2007 - and hopefully a demonstration that it’s fairly easy to get all sorts of different sorts of “records” under the Freedom of Information Act, not just written documents.

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