U.S. Air Force Confirms Afghan Flight Had over 800 Passengers

The U.S. Air Force’s Air Mobility Command issued a revised statement on Friday that confirmed one of the first C-17s to carry refugees out of Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on Sunday had over 800 passengers packed into its cargo hold.

The flight established a new record for the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III aircraft.

The pilots of the massive transport plane told air traffic controllers they had 800 people crammed into the hold.

“Good job getting off the ground!” an admiring controller replied.

Later statements from the U.S. military revised the total number of passengers down to 640, still an impressive number but slightly below the highest passenger total recorded for a C-17.

Air Mobility Command revised its official count again on Friday morning, however, revealing children were not counted in the first statement. There were 183 children on board, bringing the total for the flight up to 823 passengers, far exceeding the previous record of 670:

The revised statement explained the original passenger total was “based on how many bus seats were filled departing the aircraft and didn’t account for the number of children in laps.“

The plane was originally supposed to depart with about 300 passengers aboard, but the aircrew determined their engines could handle the huge overload and made the decision to take off without trying to force any of the refugees off.

The C-17 crew appeared on CNN on Friday morning to discuss their record-breaking flight:

The Air Force is investigating the events surrounding another famous C-17 flight that took place on Monday, where the plane was swarmed by panicked Afghans on the runway and lifted off with several of them clinging to the fuselage. 

The people hanging onto the plane fell to their deaths and at least one was crushed when he tried to stow away inside the landing gear. The pilots were unaware of the stowaway’s presence until they were unable to retract the landing gear properly. Recent statements from the Air Force indicate more than one person may have been crushed inside the wheels of the plane.

The Air Force is looking into the release of certain videos onto social media, particularly a gruesome clip showing the man stuck in the wheel well after takeoff that was apparently filmed inside the aircraft. The plane has been impounded pending the results of the investigation.

“Safety officials are doing due diligence to better understand how events unfolded,” the Air Force stated.

“Before the aircrew could offload the cargo, the aircraft was surrounded by hundreds of Afghan civilians who had breached the airport perimeter. Faced with a rapidly deteriorating security situation around the aircraft, the C-17 crew decided to depart the airfield as quickly as possible,” the statement said.

According to a preliminary investigation, the plane arrived in Kabul with supplies for American troops stationed at the airport. Thousands of Afghans rushed the plane while the crew attempted to offload their cargo.

The crew turned the plane around for launch in a matter of minutes and taxied slowly, escorted by ground vehicles and Apache helicopters which tried to keep the huge crowd of Afghan civilians on the runway at a safe distance. The daring Apache pilots flew low enough to physically push the crowd back with their rotor wash.

The crew of the plane was reportedly horrified by the discovery of dead bodies inside the landing gear, and received counseling upon landing in Qatar.