Yanky Seventy Two Crash Site
Mississippi
On the afternoon of July tenth, two thousand seventeen, a Marine Corps refueling plane with the call sign Yanky Seventy Two broke apart in the sky above this soybean country in Leflore County, Mississippi. The aircraft was a KC One Thirty Hercules carrying fifteen Marines and one Navy corpsman from a special operations unit, flying from North Carolina toward California. It was cruising at twenty thousand feet when a single propeller blade tore free of an engine and ripped through the fuselage. Everyone aboard was killed, and debris fell across these fields for miles.
Investigators traced the failure to that one corroded blade. It had passed through an Air Force maintenance depot years earlier, where the corrosion went unrepaired, and a hidden crack grew undetected. A memorial now stands near this spot, honoring the sixteen who fell from a clear summer sky.
