On the evening of January 13 at 20.39 hours local time, a Boeing KC-135 tanker of the American Air National Guard (ANG), tailnumber 91452, crashed on landing only 150 meters from the runway at the NATO air base Geilenkirchen n in Germany. All four crew members were killed in the ensuing blaze. According to military officials, the KC-135 was returning from a routine training mission over the North Sea when the pilot apparently faced problems and radioed that he will go around. It then presumably banked to the right and stalled into a wooded area about three kilometres northwest of the Geilenkirchen base, near the Dutch border. It took more than 100 Dutch and German firefighters about three hours to extinguish the burning plane.
The KC-135 was attached to the Washington Air National Guard 141st Air Refueling Wing, based at Fairchild. It was one of two planes and three crews sent to Geilenkirchen on January 3 to support refueling missions of NATO AWACS aircraft. The crew, consisting of two pilots, a navigator and a refueler, was to return to Fairchild on Friday following its two-week deployment. Finding a cause for the crash will be difficult as the KC-135 does not have flight data or voice recorders.