Why did the Hercules crash in Iraq? Guardian News 3rd February 2005 www.guardian.co.uk As US and British forces have secured the crash site and air accident investigators were picking over the debris in the hope of finding clues. The RAF C-130 Hercules crashed midway through a flight from Baghdad to a US airforce base in Balad earlier in the week, killing all 10 servicemen on board. According to a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence, the plane's safety record has hitherto been exemplary. The last time one of the RAF's Hercules planes ran into trouble was in the Balkans in 1999. The accident happened as it was taking off, but although the plane was damaged, there were no casualties.

In the absence of hard facts, defence analysts have speculated that the plane may have been brought down by a bomb or a missile launched from the ground. The planes are fitted with flares and chaff to confuse surface-to-air missiles, but most of the time, Hercules planes fly at above 20,000ft, too high to be in range of shoulder-launched missiles.

"The simplest thing they'll be looking at is the spread of the wreckage," says Damian Kemp, aviation editor of Jane's Defence Weekly. "If, for whatever reason, it exploded in the air, you're going to get a bigger spread of debris on the ground."

Investigators will also look for signs of unusual damage that could point to an explosion in a fuel tank or elsewhere on board. If they suspect that a missile did bring the plane down, chemical analyses of the plane's panels could reveal traces of explosives and so identify the type of missile used.

If answers are slow in coming, and they may well be, investigators may opt to remove as much of the wreckage as they can and attempt to rebuild the plane at a safer location. When Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in December 1988, crash investigators pieced the debris together, a painstaking task, which revealed the path of the bomb blast through the body of the plane. "Sometimes clues show up very quickly, but you get cases that can take three or more years to sort out," says David Stewart, spokesman for the Department of Transport.