Euphemisms are often funny. Stephen Green came up with a clever one when the Space X Starship exploded four minutes after it was launched. The engineers call a blast like this a “rapid, unscheduled assembly,” or RUD.
The sense of humor among engineers is not particularly well-known. Military planners are no different. On its way to Ukraine, a Russian SU-34 dropped a bomb in the city of Belgorod.
The Russian Defense Ministry also called it “an abnormal descent” of aviation munitions.
Oops.
Witnesses described a low hissing followed by an explosion that caused nearby apartment buildings to tremble, and even threw cars onto store roofs.
The crater was 66 feet wide and spanned a boulevard lined with trees, flanked by apartment blocks. It shattered the windows of several cars, injured two residents, and damaged several others. A third person was hospitalized for hypertension.
According to the Defense Ministry, three people were injured in the accident. I guess the Russians should count their blessings.
The bomb was designed to explode just a few moments after impact. The bomb was designed to attack underground facilities. Watch the video below to see how the first puff of dust is followed by a blast in 15 seconds that ruptured a natural gas line.
Here is a video of Russian authorities attempting to remove a car that was blown up onto the roof of a department-store after an explosion.
Ministry of Defense of Russia
On the evening of 20 April, during the flight of VKS Su-34 aircraft over Belgorod City, an abnormal descent was made of aviation munitions. Residential buildings were damaged as a result.
One CNN analyst called the explosion “odd”
Peter Layton is a former Royal Australian Air Force officer and visiting fellow at Griffith Asia Institute. He said that a pilot can jettison a bomb when the aircraft loses power or, in the case an Su-34 engine, the power goes out in one of the two engines.
He called the Belgorod incident on Thursday “odd” because of several reasons.
First, the munition detonated. Ordnance is normally released in an “safe” mode to prevent it from detonating, except “the bomb’s explosive file is sensitive to shock.”
Second, a plane would usually jettison the bomb in an area that was not populated.
Layton stated that “where the bomb struck; the town centre, not the countryside, almost suggests precision.”
It was fortunate that the Russians grounded him before he could do any serious damage. If it was a patriot/traitor, depending on your perspective, who dropped bombs on Russian territory deliberately, Moscow has an enormous problem.
