An Air Force B-1 bomber on a training mission crashed in southeastern Montana on Friday, killing all four crew members, the Air Force said.

"It was just a big, black mushroom cloud. It looked so black against the clear sky," Kaye Nelson said from the Valley Inn Bar & Cafe in Alzada.The crash happened about midafternoon in the corner of southeast Montana, near the state line with Wyoming. The bomber was from Ellsworth Air Force Base, near Rapid City, S.D.

"All four crew members were killed in the crash," said Capt. Gary Carruthers, a spokesman for the Air Force's Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va.

Ranch worker James Albertson said he, too, saw smoke in an area familiar to residents as an Air Force training range.

"I suspected the black smoke was either one of those planes hitting the dirt or someone burning tires," he said.

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Brian Parker was antelope hunting about a half mile from the crash site. He said the plane had been flying low and there was no indication of trouble.

"We saw the plane fly by," Parker said. "It came around us and went behind the ridge, and then we saw smoke and never saw it come back out."

The B-1B Lancer, the type flown by Ellsworth's 28th Bomb Wing, is a long-range, heavy bomber that entered Air Force service in 1985. It can carry up to 84 conventional 500-pound bombs, or an undisclosed number of nuclear weapons, and fly faster than 900 mph. It costs more than $200 million.

It was the sixth U.S. military crash in seven days.

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