The aircraft had departed Evenes Airport at 13:40, bound for Kiruna Airport with an estimated arrival at 14:30. It was participating in Cold Response, a major NATO exercise that brought together forces from Germany, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. The C-130J was the last of four Super Hercules acquired by the Norwegian military between 2008 and 2010. Its commander, 42-year-old Stale Garberg, had logged 6,229 flight hours. First officer Truls Audun Orpen, 46, had 3,286 hours. The head of the Norwegian Armed Forces described all five crew members as "among the most experienced" in the military. Experience, in this case, was not the variable that failed.

Kebnekaise rises to 6,950 feet in the Scandinavian Mountains near Kiruna. The aircraft appeared to have flown straight into the edge of the western wall. According to police, the Hercules probably exploded on impact, scattering thousands of pieces of wreckage across the mountainside and triggering an avalanche that carried debris and human remains down the slope. Footage from a Norwegian P-3 Orion search aircraft showed soot and ash spread across the mountain's face. Some recovered fragments bore burn marks and smelled of kerosene. Search dogs located human remains, and on 17 March, two days after the crash, the search for survivors was called off. The aircraft designated Siv had been completely destroyed.

The investigation, led by the Swedish Accident Investigation Authority with Norwegian participation, recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder in August 2012. Both were so badly damaged that they had to be sent to the Air Accidents Investigation Branch in the United Kingdom for data extraction. By October, the data had been successfully downloaded. A critical finding emerged: the terrain warning system had been set to landing mode, which suppressed the ground proximity warnings that would have alerted the crew to the rising terrain ahead. The accident report, released on 22 October 2013, detailed the sequence of failures. But the most disturbing revelation came years later. In 2019, it emerged that the flight crew had not been issued maps showing the correct height of Kebnekaise. The charts they carried contained little or wrong information about the terrain in Sweden, because the Norwegian Air Force lacked adequate map data for Swedish territory. A former Air Force employee had reported this in 2017, triggering an internal investigation.

The names of the five crew members were released on 16 March 2012, one day after the crash. They were all career officers in the Royal Norwegian Air Force, a small and tightly knit service. The loss hit the Norwegian military community hard. At Nikkaluokta, near the crash site, a temporary investigation base was established, and debris was gradually moved to a hangar at Kiruna Airport. The work was slowed by adverse weather and by cracks discovered in the glacier where wreckage had settled. The mountain itself became part of the investigation, its ice and snow both preserving and complicating the recovery of evidence. For the families of the crew, and for the Norwegian military, the central question was not just what happened on 15 March but why five experienced aviators were sent into an exercise area without accurate maps of the terrain they would be flying through.