it's unverified but from a military monitoring source
as someone pointed out, at the fall of saigon an A-130, which is a much smaller plane, had 537 people on board, so it's certainly possible if they lost control of boarding as the pictures show and it became a free-for-all
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Mon 16 Aug 2021, 10:04,
Reply)
C-130?
They've both got the weight capacity, it's the volume I doubt.
(, Mon 16 Aug 2021, 10:25, Reply)
i no way of knowing, but if you see the huge crowd on the tarmac of fearful desperate people who if they cant get on a plane face torture and death
and some of the video on twitter of the mad scramble and fighting scenes at the airport, then it doesn't seem too far-fetched that they'd pack in like a clown car
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Mon 16 Aug 2021, 10:39,
Reply)
Ever been in the cargo hold of a C-17
It’s bloody massive.
(
wheresthefish Partly filled with wrong, Mon 16 Aug 2021, 13:55,
Reply)
Maybe if they put a temporary second floor in...
Yeah, I've been in an Antonov An-124 too - like a cathedral.
Let's be frank, the whole sordid affair has been a mass of pain, death and suffering caused by imperialist warmongering, with outstandingly terrible side effects across the globe. I've never been to Afghanistan, but it took six of my mates, and for what?
(, Mon 16 Aug 2021, 15:30, Reply)
sorry to hear it
i lost some friends in the early 2000s, and it still hurts
some think the colossal obscene tragic failure was justified because taliban = bad and this also absolves us from any culpability, reparations or future engagement, a metric they hypocritically don't apply to any other regimes, at least, those willing to buy british goods, or their own government who invades countries and kills thousands of civilian on pretexts exposed as invented. As stephen fry pointed out in the video recently posted, a lack of understanding of the complexities of moral relativism and simplistic perspective is something they share with the fundamentalist people they've demonised, and helped allow this highly predictable failure to go ahead
As to the plane, I saw a pic this morning and to my visual estimation was well short of 800, so you were spot on with your assessment of its packing limitations
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 17 Aug 2021, 3:48,
Reply)
sorry to hear it from you too...
I quite agree. I'd add how the only folk who really know the pointlessness of it - and learn from it, are the normal folk at the sharp end. It's only positive is for supportive politicians and shareholders of the like of Halliburton.
The Grauniad pegs it at 640. See: www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/afghanistan-striking-image-appears-to-show-640-people-fleeing-kabul-in-packed-us-military-plane
(, Tue 17 Aug 2021, 11:16, Reply)