Israeli helicopter crashes in Romania

The victims of the helicopter crash were commemorated on Wednesday morning in all the Romanian military units. The joint military exercise Blue Sky 2010, which consisted of search, rescue and evacuation missions, was canceled and replaced by a common inquiry through which Romanian and Israeli investigators are trying to discover the causes of the crash.


For the time being the official version is that, given the dense fog, the transport helicopter CH 53 hit a cliff and fell to the ground.

Off the record, it seems that, last week, the same helicopter was forced to land urgently due to a technical malfunction. Investigators do not rule out the possibility of human error.

Professor Itzhak Guttman Ben-Zvi, former vice-president of the Israeli aeronautic consortium, told Radio Romania’s correspondent to Jerusalem that this type of helicopter is designed for low height flights. But the catastrophe occurred at an altitude of almost 2 thousand meters.


Meanwhile, the press in Bucharest, quoting Israeli media, provides details on the Israeli soldiers' mission in Romania’s mountains.

Seven years ago, the two countries concluded an agreement related to the hosting of such military exercises, against payment.

According to the daily paper Evenimentul Zilei, “until recently, because of Israel’s limited air space, the Israeli air forces usually chose to organize military exercises on Turkish territory.”

But the recent souring of diplomatic relations between the two former strategic allies in the East prompted Turkey to close its air space for such exercises, which forced Israel to look for other hosts. These include Romania, alongside the USA, Greece, Italy, Germany as well as other countries of the world.


The reason why the Carpathians were chosen for the military exercises, military experts say, as quoted by the daily ROMANIA LIBERA, is that “they resemble the forms of relief in a specific part of Iran”.

A detail which, according to newspapers, might reveal the stakes of the military exercise in the Carpathians, “given the rumors regarding a possible Israeli air strike on the nuclear facilities” of the Islamist regime in Tehran.

(Radio România Internaţional, Serviciul în limba engleză).