By CHRISTOPHER WEBER and KONSTANTIN TOROPINTuesday June 16, 2026
A B-52 bomber plunged from the sky moments after taking off from a U.S. Air Force base in Southern California’s Mojave Desert on Monday, erupting in flames and killing all eight people on board, military officials said.
By the time aerial footage captured the scene, little remained of the aircraft, which went down at about 11:20 a.m. during a routine test mission at Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles. A broad stretch of scorched desert near the runway was cloaked in black smoke, with emergency vehicles gathered nearby.
Those aboard the B-52 included government contractors and uniformed military personnel. Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, said Monday evening that two of its employees were among the dead.
After reviewing crash footage, officials concluded that no one could have survived, Col. James Hayes, deputy commander for the 412th Test Wing at Edwards, said during a news conference.
“We lost eight great Americans,” Hayes said, adding that authorities were in the process of notifying their families.
The cause was not immediately known, and Hayes said the investigation could take as long as six months. He said the aircraft had been supporting the “radar modernization program.”
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, a long-range bomber that entered service in 1955, was built to carry conventional and nuclear weapons. Over the decades, it has seen action in conflicts involving the U.S. military from Vietnam to Iran.
In 2025, Boeing delivered a B-52 to Edwards fitted with a new, modernized radar system. According to an Air Force news release from that year, a test team was scheduled to conduct ground and flight testing on the aircraft throughout 2026 ahead of a production decision. The upgraded Active Electronically Scanned Array, or AESA, radar replaced the plane’s older system to improve effectiveness. It was not immediately clear whether Monday’s crash involved that same aircraft.
Edwards Air Force Base, about 100 miles (161 km) north of Los Angeles, hosts a major share of the Air Force’s aircraft testing and development work. The 412th Test Wing, which operates the base, carries out developmental testing on Air Force aircraft, weapons systems, software and components before purchase by the service and throughout their service lives.
The sprawling desert installation is also where Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, reaching Mach 1.05.
The airfield was shut down for much of Monday, and all incoming aircraft were diverted. By late afternoon, however, it had reopened for people entering the base. Non-commercial visitor passes were suspended as emergency crews worked to extinguish the fire.
It remains too early to know exactly what went wrong.
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said he was deeply saddened by the deaths.
“We mourn this loss and honor the service of our Airmen, civilians, and contractors who work every day to advance our mission,” he said in a post on X.
The fact that the B-52 came down so quickly after liftoff, without gaining much altitude or traveling far, led aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti to suspect a flight control problem.
He said the controls may have been misconfigured after maintenance, or that a catastrophic engine failure or a malfunction in equipment under test could also be to blame.
“I think it was definitely a controllability issue. Now, whether that was tied to an engine failure, a flight control failure, or some new testing device failure, I’m not sure,” said Guzzetti, a former crash investigator for both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.
Even though the Air Force has operated B-52 bombers for more than 70 years, fitting a plane with new equipment can add another layer of risk.
“A flight test is always riskier than normal operations, so that’s why you have specially trained test pilots, and you should have other safety protocols,” Guzzetti said.
In recent years, fatal Air Force training accidents in the U.S. have included an instructor pilot who died in 2024 when an ejection seat activated while the aircraft was still on the ground in Texas, and the death of an Air Force ROTC cadet in a 2022 accident involving a Humvee during a training exercise in Idaho. Two Air Force pilots were also killed when a trainer jet crashed near an Alabama airport in 2021.
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Toropin reported from Washington, D.C. AP Transportation Writer Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, and AP reporters Hallie Golden in Seattle and Jennifer Kelleher in Honolulu contributed to this report.
