The aircraft departed Soewondo Air Force Base at 12:08 in the afternoon, bound for Tanjung Pinang with scheduled stops at Natuna and Pontianak before returning to its home base in Malang, East Java. Passengers had boarded at multiple earlier stops -- Malang, Jakarta, Pekanbaru -- and the plane was full. Roughly two minutes into the flight, about five kilometers from the base, the pilot radioed a request to return. What happened next unfolded with terrifying speed. The aircraft rolled hard to the right. Eyewitnesses saw it clip a radio tower belonging to a local FM station, then pitch downward. The nose struck the Golden Eleven Hotel. The fuselage slammed into three other buildings, including a crowded massage parlor, at a near-vertical angle. Multiple explosions followed, audible from a kilometer away. Onlookers described the scene as hell-like, with bodies thrown onto the street.

Military transport flights like this one were common in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago where moving personnel between islands is a constant logistical challenge. Families routinely traveled aboard military aircraft alongside serving members during duty rotations. The 110 passengers on A-1310 included soldiers reporting to new postings, wives accompanying their husbands, and children. All 122 people on board died. On the ground, 17 more perished -- residents of the Djamin Ginting Road neighborhood who had no warning that an aircraft was falling toward them. Identification of the dead began the following day at Adam Malik Hospital in Medan. The National Search and Rescue Agency recovered roughly 100 intact bodies and 60 body parts from the wreckage. By July 4, at least 119 had been identified and returned to their families.

The crash site sat in the dense urban fabric of Medan, Indonesia's third-largest city. Soewondo Air Force Base occupies the grounds of the former Polonia Airport, which had served as Medan's main commercial airport until 2013. Polonia was replaced by Kualanamu International Airport partly because of safety concerns: the old airport lay just two kilometers from the city center, with flight paths crossing directly over residential neighborhoods. Converting it to military use did not eliminate the fundamental risk of operating large aircraft so close to dense housing. The crash site was located only two kilometers from where Mandala Airlines Flight 091 had gone down in 2005, also minutes after takeoff from the same runway, killing 149 people. The same stretch of Medan had now been struck twice in a decade.

Investigators faced an immediate handicap: the C-130B carried no flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder. The National Transportation Safety Committee had to rely on wreckage analysis, pilot history, and witness testimony. By July 3, evidence pointed to a malfunction in the number four engine propeller. Roughly ninety percent of witnesses confirmed the aircraft struck a mobile phone tower before the final dive -- a tower that authorities later determined had been erected illegally. But the deeper issue was the aircraft itself. After the United States imposed a military embargo on Indonesia from 1999 to 2005 over the East Timor crisis, spare parts for the American-built fleet became impossible to source through normal channels. The C-130Bs soldiered on with aging components. Public outrage focused on this point. Indonesian officials insisted the aircraft had been in good condition, but President Joko Widodo and Vice President Jusuf Kalla agreed that retiring old military aircraft was now a national priority.

The 2015 crash was the deadliest C-130 Hercules accident in Indonesian history, surpassing a 1991 crash in East Jakarta. It was also the third-deadliest air disaster in North Sumatra province, after Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 in 1997 and Mandala Airlines Flight 091 in 2005, and the second major Indonesian air disaster in just six months, following the loss of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 over the Java Sea in December 2014. For Medan, the patterns were impossible to ignore -- the same neighborhood, the same vulnerable flight path, the same minutes after takeoff. The Indonesian Air Force grounded its entire C-130 fleet for inspection. The crash prompted calls to remove illegal communications towers across Indonesia, a response that addressed one contributing factor while leaving the harder questions about fleet maintenance and military transport safety unresolved.