One pilot retrieved, the other missing. Pentagon says it was a mechanical problem. The Pentagon is sure it wasn’t shot down.
Weird. Google News isn’t finding the story on Fox News, BBC, Al Jazeera, London Telegraph, etc… yet… some small newspaper in Virginia NPR has reported it.
Telegraph story
The Telegraph apparently is so illiterate about military issues that they think when both pilots eject and the plane flies into the ground, that’s a “crash landing”
Speculation:
The F15E cannot fly from carriers. The only F15E base in Europe is in Suffolk, England, about 1,700 miles from Benghazi. My guess (partly from looking at the crash picture) is that they ran out of fuel – due to some snafu with inflight refueling.
It’s not likely it is forward based somewhere closer on such short notice – you need lots of equipment to service the planes, store and mount the armaments, housing for the pilots, etc…
More details – the F15E is a variant of the F15 designed for a dual role – air to air, and air to ground. The second “pilot” is actually the weapons officer. He doesn’t fly the plane, he flies the missiles.
The plane has ground following radar and an infrared camera. It can fly at very low levels on autopilot using the ground following radar. The plane seems to have crashed at night. People only knew about the crash when they found the debris in the morning.